


for our world is cold and full of monsters

by chancellor_valdez



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Apocalypse, Slow Burn, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, braime vs the zombie apocalypse, i really don't know what i'm doing, roadtrip au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2019-11-23 15:05:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 41,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18153440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chancellor_valdez/pseuds/chancellor_valdez
Summary: He saw her swallow and her eyes narrow. He chuckled. “Are you one of those idiots naive enough to think there’s still good people left in this shit storm?”“There are.”“No there aren’t. Not anymore.” He knew it. World like this infected you. It bled the good out of people, and threw away the ones that weren’t smart enough to adapt. There weren’t any good people left.In which two desperate people find each other at the end of the world, surrounded by death, and realize maybe they can find something worth it after all.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hi. what's up. how are you.
> 
> this work isn't beta-ed and i've never written got fic before, so i hope it's not terrible or boring or awful. we're just here to have fun and cry about braime.

The cold was bitter, the wind angry, as Brienne approached the farmhouse, despite the sun shining clear and high in the sky. The few strands of light hair that occasionally fell in front of her eyes whipped around her face with a fury. She was sure she felt her bones themselves shiver.. It was always cold. It was always brutal. That was life now. Frozen, barren, and dangerous.

The small white home had appeared over the horizon as she was began considering her camp for the night, like a tiny beacon of salvation sent from one god or the other. So she pushed forward the extra mile for the chance at relief from the cold for the night; and the possibility of a pantry to calm her aching belly. She had run out food the previous morning.

The house was humble, nestled within a small outcrop of dying spruce trees, covered in chipped and peeling white paint. It looked long abandoned from a time before the human race completely fucked itself. A token of how much had changed, how much had been lost. The porch was missing two steps and she highly suspected the roof was a decent snowfall away from collapsing in on itself. She would take it, for a shelter was a shelter at this point.

Beyond the threshold, the interior of the house was in much the same condition. Dust covered every surface, thick cobwebs danced in every doorway. She would have guessed the house hadn’t been inhabited since the outbreak. She counted the days back to herself.

208 days since the outbreak.

96 days since the station.

53 days since she last encountered another living person.

It was amazing how fast the entire world could go to shit when it wanted to.

She cleared the first floor of any surprises, trying her best to avoid looking at the faded photos still sitting in their frames. They always reminded her of ghosts staring out of frosted window. Dead souls that used to live there, sleep there, do homework around the kitchen table there, preserved behind glass. Of how she didn’t belong there. Of how the rotted shell of a house used to be a home and she was walking through the dust left behind. It just didn’t feel _right._

Then, it would often make her wonder if that’s what her childhood home looked like now. A museum of death. Did her twelve year old face haunt the hearts of survivors picking through the things her family left behind? Was she someone else’s ghost?

It was easier when she didn’t look at the pictures. 

The stairs groaned as she climbed to the second level and she was almost afraid they would crumble beneath all her weight. She wasn’t exactly slight. But she reached the top, the knife from her thigh grasped firmly in her fist. It was easier, and it caused less noise.

Brienne had caught on quickly to the rule of checking the whole house for them before she went about looking for any food or valuables. Beefaroni didn’t really matter if the was a chunk out of your neck. One close call was enough for her to learn.

The first two rooms were empty bedrooms, the beds left unmade. The third room across the hall was shut and as she turned the knob and cracked the door open she was assaulted by the stench of death. The smell of decaying, rotting gore hit her so hard she had to stumble backwards and press her sleeve against her face for protection. 

_Eyes gone milky white. Meat sliding off of bones. Dark blood bubbling on pale lips. Limbs twisted and curled and broken._

It all flashed behind her eyelids with the smell. She wanted to climb out of her own skin and leave it behind.

It wasn’t a new smell, the way things were now, but she would never get used to it. How do you get used to something like that? The way it slid down her nose straight to her gut, bringing tears to her eyes, and clawing at her throat with sharp fingers. In reality the origin of the smell, was the soft, bloated body of a girl who had drowned herself in the bathtub after her last sister died. But Brienne didn’t find that out because she slammed the door closed and threw up on the floor.

She wasn’t staying here tonight. Someone was dead and decomposing in that second floor room to the left of the stairs and she did not feel like sleeping under the same roof as a corpse. Maybe it was stupid and human and any other logical person would have said _'fuck it'_ and just chosen a different room. But now that the smell was in her mind she couldn’t rid herself of cold fingers tugging at her skin in her sleep and dead eyes staring into her. 

She’d check the pantry for any non-perishables left behind and risk the discomfort of sleeping on the frozen ground once again. 

There wasn’t much of use to be discovered in any of the cabinets or drawers, save for a miniature flashlight and a flat head screwdriver. She pocketed both. The pantry held a few treasures. One jar of olives, one large can of fruit cocktail mix, two cans of black beans, and a tin of wet cat food. She loaded them all into her pack. She’d been driven to eat pet food before. Like most things, it didn’t taste terrible when she was starving. 

She grabbed a quilt from the couch on her way out. Normally she refrained from taking personal items she didn’t need from the homes she raided, out of respect for the families. Even if they were never coming back to get them, it made her feel dirty and she wished to hold on to as much of her humanity from before as she could. 

She wouldn’t even be able to travel with it, but at the very least it could provide her was some protection against the cold. There was a small rock alcove she had passed on her way to the farmhouse, and she expected to find decent enough shelter from the winds there as she left the homestead and corpse within it behind her, loathe to face the biting cold once again.

It was almost dark by the time she had reached the tiny alcove and set to building a fire. Later maybe she would blame the cold for dulling her senses, or the hunger chewing incessantly at her stomach for distracting her, for was definitely not expecting the icy press of metal against her throat or the barest of shadows falling over her shoulder. 

0 days since she last encountered another living person.


	2. Chapter 2

The blade was ice against the soft skin of her throat, and Brienne could tell it was sharp. Sharp enough to cut through her neck if that’s what the shadow behind her meant to do. 

“Don’t move.” It was a deep voice, strong, but roughened by the cold. 

She stayed frozen where she was, still as a statue of ice. Though her heart did hammer wildly against her ribcage, she had already begun analyzing the situation and her escape before the words even left his lips. 

_Knife at her thigh. The smaller blade strapped to her ankle. Gun on the ground, out of reach to her left. Behind her. Above her._

He seemed about her match in size, if not a bit smaller. She just had to loosen his arm enough for her to reach-

“Go for either of them and I open your throat. Be my guest.” He sounded smooth with confidence. No, with arrogance.

She almost let herself smile. Good. It was better when they were arrogant. They didn’t see her coming then. It made made them clumsy. With it came the blind spot where people thought they were the one controlling the game, one step ahead. It was that blind spot she slid into like a knife between ribs to tip the scale. Let him underestimate her.

“Okay.” Compliant.

She slowly lifted her hands from her lap, palms out. Non-threatening. 

When she was fourteen, her father had let her take a self defense class for young girls. _For the bullies._

When she was fifteen, she started kickboxing classes. _To let out her anger._

When she was seventeen, she taught the classes. _Because she could._

It made her feel safe and it made her feel powerful. The world had always been a dangerous place for women, but even more so since the world ended and any manner of law or order that did exist vanished into the wind with the ones who upheld it. The world was savage now. And a savage world bred people. 

She did not want to be made savage, but she did want to remain alive.

It began and ended in a matter of seconds. A momentary blur of moving limbs and teeth and bodies, and then the knife at her throat was in her hand and the man behind her was unconscious at her feet. 

 

 

Jaime had thought it a fairly sound plan, to get food from the stranger with force, when he first thought it. His brother would have said it was because he was too impulsive. Cersei would have said he was just stupid. He would have said he did it because he wanted to. 

He hadn’t eaten anything in three days. His whole body ached with hunger, knifing through his stomach, and pulling at his skin. The moment he had seen that the burly man had food, he knew he didn’t give a single shit about being polite. The yearning coursed through every inch of him. He didn’t have time to feign peace or trust. He didn’t have it. 

He saw it, he wanted it, he’d take it. The world didn’t owe him favors anymore. 

The stranger was obviously bigger than him, but he was quicker. And he wouldn’t see him coming. 

When he next came around with his wrists bound together and roped to the nearest tree, he realized maybe he had made a mistake. The back of his head fucking throbbed like someone had trapped lighting within his skull. He had to blink several times to clear his vision and shake the fog behind his eyes. 

When he finally looked up the fair haired man he had failed to rob sat across a small fire leaned forward and watching him, Jaime’s own blade in his hands. Fire light licked across him, bathing his pale and homely features in an orange glow. Short blonde hair, raked greasily back from a large scowling face, wide lips cracked and pink from the cold, and round blue eyes that glittered in the shadows of their face and Jaime had to pause a moment because…

“Oh fuck, are you a woman?” were the first words past his lips and into the frigid space between them. His captor grimaced, scowling more than he thought possible. She didn’t speak though. She just scowled. His knife slowly turning over between her dirty fingers. “That _is_ surprising. Though I guess it makes me considerably more embarrassed about this whole thing, doesn’t it?”

Still, she didn’t speak, but one of her eyebrows lifted in a way he was sure was meant to mock him. He briefly wondered if she’d be any less ugly if she lifted her face from it’s current frown. He doubted it.

He tested his wrists in his lap. The thick cord was bound several times around one wrist, wrapped around the tree behind him, and attached to the other wrist on his opposite side with just enough length for him to clasp them both in his lap. The knots were tight though, too tight for him to slip or wiggle out of with any ease. Careful girl. 

“May I ask why I’ve been tied to this tree?” 

“You tried to rob me with a knife,” she kept her tone flat, almost as if she were bored of him already. But he could see in the way her eyes tracked him that she was nervous too. She looked like an anxious cow.

“Oh so she speaks.” He could tell the lightness of his voices bothered her. Good. “That is correct. However, you could have killed me instead?”

Her head tipped to the side in confusion and the crease between her eyebrows deepened. 

“Why?”

“You just said. I tried to rob you. I put that little blade right up against your throat, didn’t I?”

He saw her swallow and her eyes narrow. He chuckled. “Are you one of those idiots naive enough to think there’s still good people left in this shit storm?”

“There are.”

“No there aren’t. Not anymore.” He knew it. World like this infected you. It bled the good out of people, and threw away the ones that weren’t smart enough to adapt. There weren’t any good people left. 

“There could be.” He almost felt bad for her, for the humanity she stunk of still clutched to her chest. It made his stomach roll and he had to laugh. A harsh, mocking laugh pulled from his lungs. _Stupid._

“That’s a pipe dream, darling. Not in this nightmare. You should learn that.”

“Then, why didn’t you just kill me and take it?” 

_Because it wasn’t your fault god gave up on us and my stomach is too long empty and you were the one who had food. Because I already have too much blood on my hands; too many ghosts yelling inside my head. Because I may not be a good person, but I think I’m tired of being a bad one._

He didn’t say it though. He kept it choked back and hidden deep in his gut. Where he packed away every soft part of himself.

Her eyes seared into him. They were striking eyes. They made him want to look away in fear of what she might see. He didn’t have much spark left and it was buried too deep for anyone to find, but she seemed like the kind of idiot who would try. Maybe he was nervous too.

“So am I your prisoner now?” 

“I haven’t decided yet.” 

“Let me know when you do. We could make this a lot kinkier. More fun for sure.” He lifted his bound hands for emphasis. A pink blush crept up her neck and colored her cheeks. It was harsh against her light skin. He decided he liked it, seeing her uncomfortable, and he’d have to make her blush more if he got the chance. It left him grinning. 

“Not interested,” she replied in the gruff way she spoke. Even her voice was far from feminine. 

“Have a better offer? No, I’d imagine not, with the population being low as it is. Though I suppose not even without that, beastly thing you are.” 

“You’re trying to make me angry.”

“Am I?”

“You won’t,” but her voice was already tight.

“Are you sure?” He wanted to get under her skin, and play in her veins. He wanted to dance around her head. It had been so long since he’d talked to anyone that talked back. It’d been so long since he got to spar with tongues and eyes and insult. His cruelty, his untouched need for jest, had been too long turned against himself. She was just the unlucky participant he needed. Even if she didn’t know it. Or want it.

She just shook her head at him, like she was disappointed in what she found in the man she had tied to a free for trying to steal her belongings at knife point. She sighed and her heavy shoulders sagged with the weight of it. Jaime couldn’t decide if he found it amusing or upsetting that people still found a way to be disappointed in him at the edge of it all. The more some things changed, the more others stayed the same.

“You know you should put the fire out.”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s great, but they can feel it. The heat. I’m just telling you, they’ll find you quicker if you leave it.”

“And I’m just telling you it’s near freezing and I’ll be fine.”

She finally straightened her massive body, revealing even more height, and even more strength. He wasn’t surprised he took her for a man from a distance. She stabbed his stolen knife into the ground next to the boulder she sat on and dug through the pack at her feet. 

His next insult died in his throat when she came up again with a can and he was reminded just how loud the ache in his stomach had become. It filled his bloodstream down to his fingertips with how desperate it was. His mouth filled with thick saliva just at the appearance of food. He licked his lips.

The tab pulled back and his eyes drank in the sight of what looked like beans, or something, so close. It was so close and he was so hungry. His stomach weeped. She ate half the can in seconds. He watched with envy as she shoveled the contents into her mouth sloppily, and with little concern for appearances or femininity. That had been lost in her own hunger, if she ever had it at all.

Oddly enough, the sight brought Cersei back to his mind. How she would sneer. She would laugh and he would see the venom in her green eyes. He would guess even in starvation on a planet pushed to the brink she would find no excuse for such a display. She was always careful not to exude anything less than perfection and grace. The ache in his stomach traveled upwards to his heart until he could feel it lodged in his throat.

This woman, he watched, ate like an animal. Black liquid dribbled over her thick lips and down her chin every time she opened her mouth for more food. Part of him felt almost bad for wanting to take her dinner from her, but another part, the not good part that just wanted to eat again, wished he’d just killed her and taken it. Now, he had too much pride to outright admit his hunger and ask her for a share of the food. He was past that wrong decision, even if her remaining good nature proved to him she probably would have conceded a can if he’d been friendly the first time around.

She didn’t seem as forthcoming at present.

“Do you plan on introducing yourself or shall I just call ‘prison wench’? Or maybe just, ‘you bitch’,” he pondered aloud almost whistfully. It earned him a scowl over the lip of the can. “Should I go first? Hello, I’m Jaime.”

“Brienne,” she finally sighed. The makeshift spoon scraped at the bottom of her can.

“How nice to meet you Brienne. Can I assume you’re headed south as well?”

Her face scrunched up in the middle in question while she chewed. 

“You and everyone else,” he offered.

“It’s supposed to be safer. There’s sanctuaries there.”

A low laugh fumbled in his chest. “That’s what they say.”

“You don’t think so? Then why are you going that way?”

He paused for a moment, turning it over a few times and contemplating. He settled on the truth. “Where else is there to go?”

She nodded and looked down, away from his eyes. That was the truth of it. The whole truth of it would include how that was where Cersei was when it all happened. It would include the fact that even if he thought her long dead, there was a cruel, stupid part of him left that hoped maybe she would still be there if he made it. And even if she wasn’t, it was as close as he’d get to her again.

Brienne sucked the last of her dinner clean from the can, setting it down and dragging her sleeve across her dirty mouth. She looked at him.

“Oh, have you made a decision? Have you finally realized I’m too handsome to dispose of and you’ll have your way with me? I should have seen it coming really. The way you blush.” Just the mention brought the out the crimson patches of skin around her neck and cheeks. 

“The way you continue to speak makes me think you’d actually prefer the death.”

“Ouch. Now I don’t think that’s fair seeing as-”

“Shut up,” she snapped. She had straightened up. A touched nerve perhaps?

“This is why, ‘you bitch’ was-”

“Shut the fuck up!” It was the urgency in her voice as much as the way her hand went to the bowie knife strapped to her thigh as she stood and scanned the darkness around them that made him snap his mouth shut. “Do you hear that?”

His breath caught in his throat and his ears strained to hear any noise at all. Any broken branch. A scuff through the dirt. A dry leaf crunching. His eyes flitted from shadow to shadow standing between rocks and behind trees. The air was so unbelievably still. “Untie me,” he whispered.

She didn’t even turn his way. 

“Brienne.” He added more urgency to his hushed voice. Anxiety was building behind his ribs at being trapped. He felt sick. “Un-fucking-tie me.”

She turned her head towards him that time, and that was when the shadow to her left lurched forward. The decaying shape came out of nowhere, as they usually did, and slammed itself into her shoulder with enough force to push her off balance and send them to the ground hard. Another followed behind it. A third near Jaime.

He’d heard people call them zombies. It’s what they technically were, decaying bodies reanimated and ravaged by the infection driven only by bloodlust, but it felt like a cosmic joke to admit that. It felt too fake and foreign and fictional. Even so, they were quicker. They didn’t lumber or shuffle like hollywood had decided. They stuck with the same human speed they had as living creatures. Like the one advancing on his right.

“Shit, shit, shitshitshit.” He tried to scramble away or upright or anywhere that was just away. His legs struck out and landed a kick at the thing’s shins with enough power to send it to the ground. He continued kicking his legs out, knocking it away from him. 

“Brienne!” Feet away she was wrestling on the ground, one fist around the bloated neck of the one on top of her, as her other hand grasped for the knife still sheathed on her thigh. “Some fucking help, please.”

It’s possible he heard her growl something about being busy. She pulled her blade free and the next second it was buried hilt deep in the side of the thing’s temple. She yanked it free, quickly enough rose to her feet, and sent it through the chin of the of the second one with just as much ease as the first. Thick, brown sludge trickled down the metal and between her fingers. Then, she looked in his direction to where his legs were still kicking out wildly in front of him. “Fuck.”

Thankfully, she rounded the fire and grabbed a fist full of the hair still in it’s scalp and yanked it away from his flailing legs. Her knife cut through the soft decaying length of its neck like it was soft butter, until the head was separate from the shoulders.

It had to have been over within a single minute. Three of them taken care of and done with. He stared at her as she tosses the head to the side and reminded himself not to underestimate her again in the future. She was obviously a perfectly capable woman. He was almost impressed. Almost.

She wiped the blade in the grass and returned it to her thigh.

Jaime cleared his throat. “Would this be a bad time to say, I told you so?”

 

 

She left him still tied to the tree as she hauled the bodies away from the makeshift camp. He could tell she was burdened by it. The daft thing probably wished she could bury the things. Out of respect or honor or something stupid that was wasted on the world now.

When she came back she didn’t say anything else. He watched her spread out a sad looking quilt and move her things around, glancing at him a few times before kicking enough dirt into the fire and settling in. 

She hadn’t even been still for 30 seconds he thought before she let out a monstrous sigh and sat up again. 

A can was tossed into his lap. 

A can of cat food. 

“Um, this is not human food.”

“I know,” she laid her body back against the ground and rolled away from him. She said nothing else. 

“Well, by all means don’t overdo it on the generosity.” A decent man would be grateful the oaf had heart enough to pity him with some of her supply, when she didn’t have to give him anything. But he didn’t think himself a decent man, especially not now, and he was bitter enough that the meager heart she did have wasn’t warm enough to offer him something that was designed for actual human consumption.

“Hmph.”

He looked down at the yellow can in his hands. The cat printed on the label smiled up at him, like it was laughing. _Ha ha this is what karma gets you._ Try to rob the last naive person left on the planet that’s decent enough to offer you food and you get a chicken liver and gravy dinner. He had half the mind to toss it back, at her head. But then his stomach rumbled and he felt the hollowness at his center. 

Brienne didn’t move. 

“Are you going to untie me?”

“Nope.”

He waited until he was sure she had fallen asleep before he embarrassingly pulled the tab off and swallowed the putrid contents in three mouthfuls.


	3. Chapter 3

Brienne woke up far too early and far too cold. She rose and her entire body protested with the movement, too stiff and aching as if it was as angry about the state of things as she was. The frigid air turned her breath into smoke on her lips. 

She lifted her body from the ground and looked across the camp, if it could be called that, to the man she’d left tied to a dead oak tree the night before. The sight of him alone pulled a groan from her chest. End of the world and she’d run into the most aggravating person left around, made even more aggravating by how handsome he was. 

He was asleep, thankfully, with his head rolled to the side, against his shoulder. His golden hair was unwashed and fell in his eyes and down the back his neck. Though a short beard covered most of his sunken face, she could tell his jawline was sharp and his face statuesque, complete with a perfect pointed nose and perfect eyes that sparkled when he had thrown barbs at her the hours before. He had no business being so pretty and so annoying and so verbal all at the same time. 

It made her stomach hurt just looking at him and thinking about how she was going to manage getting rid of the bastard. <1> The handsome and annoying bastard. One small, unintelligent part of her was convinced she didn’t want to, because even a person as mind numbingly irritating as him was still a person, and she had been alone so long. Another part, maybe the part with more sense and less morals begged her to just leave him there with the tree before he woke up. 

The sight of the empty tin of cat food at his side did give her a small feeling of satisfaction.

She didn’t like him, and he **definitely** didn’t trust him, but…

“You know you don’t have to wait until I’m asleep to stare at me?” he said without opening his eyes, and yes she should have left him behind while she could. He was sure to be a nagging pain in her ass. 

She heaved a sigh. She could’ve used a few more minutes of her life not filled with him talking. It was her rotten luck, she knew. A big joke the universe was playing on her for wishing she had someone else to talk to, and then wishing that person would just keep his mouth shut when she finally ran into one.

He smirked and finally opened his eyes to look at her. “No need to be embarrassed. It is a very pretty face.”

She rolled her eyes and looked down, praying she had managed to keep her blush under control this time around.  
“Have you decided on how you plan on killing me this morning? Decisions decisions to be made.”

She ignored him. 

“I do enjoy watching an honorable and good woman, such as yourself, wrestle with these difficult moral decisions. You could let me go, obviously, but then who’s to say I won’t follow you and slit your throat the next time you fall asleep? But then there’s the other option of you killing me here right now, while I’m tied up and defenseless. Oh what will she choose.”

“I could also just leave you here, as you are.”

His eyes narrowed in her direction, probably trying to figure out if she had the heart to abandon him like that. She knew she didn’t. He probably already knew it too, nd he was just using the time to play with her. Again.

“Or,” she breathed, stopping to take in just how stupid the next sentence out of her mouth was going to be, “You could come with me.”

That surprised him. The confusion that passed over his face was a decent enough reward. 

“What?”

“We both plan on heading south, you could come with me. Travel,” she pauses, “together.”

She waited for him to laugh. He didn’t.

Instead, he studied her, searched her eyes for signs of a bluff or a joke. He didn’t have her pinned down as well as he thought he had. Good. 

“And, pray tell, why would I fucking do that?”

“I don’t know. Safety in numbers. Company. Shits and giggles.”

“Company? I see. The cow is lonely and wants to keep me around, huh? For shits and giggles.”

He was the most ridiculous man she ever had the misfortune of running into. Everything out of his mouth was said like a joke and she wondered if he had taken anything seriously his entire life.

“Risky option, offering the bad man a seat at your table.”

“I can handle you,” she reminded him. Had he already forgotten how he ended up tied to the tree, or was he just confident enough in himself it didn’t matter? 

“And if I decide to kill you in your sleep after all?”

“I still have the cord. I can always tie you up again.”

“Oh, back to tying me up again?”

There really was no point trying to have an actual conversation with him. She heard that second voice telling her just to leave the man to his own devices. Maybe that silver tongue of his could sweet talk one of _them_ into setting him free.

She gave up and stood to brush herself off and get ready to leave. Jaime’s knife was freed from the solid dirt where she had left it, and tucked into her belt. The cans tumbled over each other in her pack. 

“I have to piss.”

She sent him her very best ‘you’re fucking kidding me?’ face, but he simply shrugged unapologetically. 

“I’ve been tied up here for hours haven’t I? Did you expect me to just piss myself then?”

“Yes,” he probably deserved it. 

“You’re a very mean woman.”

“You held a knife to my throat.” She crossed her arms over her chest to stare him down. The air around him stunk of someone who thought could talk his way into getting whatever he wanted.

“For what it’s worth I would not choose to do that again,” he said it sincerely enough, but she could guess he probably would’ve killed her instead if given that second chance. 

But she conceded, albeit reluctantly and moved towards the tree.

It was a stupid decision on her part, she’d admit. The very moment the rope fell away from one wrist, his hand was darting to his own knife at her belt. It was in his fist and pressed against her stomach in seconds. He moved fluidly and purposefully, she could give him that. He was good. 

She was better. He really should have learned that the first time.

For as she saw his hand fly to the knife at her hip, hers went to the one at her thigh. Her elbow went to his face. And then her knife went to his throat. The pointed tip rested just barely against the exposed skin under his chin. One jerk and it’d be through his mouth and into his brain, but she let it rest there. She had a point to prove.

They froze like that, the pair of them inches apart, poised with blades pressed to the other’s bodies, chests heaving in time together. One hard pair of eyes staring into another pair of glittering ones. 

The air was thick around her lungs. 

And then the idiot smiled, a huge, shiteating grin that stretched across his face almost in a twisted sense of satisfaction. “Okay. I’ll go.”

She didn’t move. “What?” she asked in obvious confusion. Had he not just tried to stab her? For a second time?

He raised both his hands, palms up towards her in surrender, and let the knife drop to the ground. “I’ll go with you. Travel south together. Sounds like a good plan. I would indeed very much enjoy the company.” He had the nerve to wink at her. “You can let go of me now. I really do need to piss.” 

And with that, he pulled away from her and turned to unzip his pants, and she couldn’t think of a single word to say.

 

 

She has concluded that Jaime seemed to have made it his life’s new sole mission to make her as miserable as possible. 

With every passing minute and every new sentence out of his mouth, Brienne thought about knocking him out and leaving his body on the side of the road. Or gagging him. Or shooting him in the foot. They had barely traveled more than an hour and she missed the silence of her own solitude. The man loved to hear the sound of his own voice, she would give him that. Even when she didn’t grant her voice to the conversation, he kept on. 

It mainly consisted of him spewing nonsense and her rolling her eyes or grunting. After the first hour, she just focused on tuning him out.

But a traitorous part of her, and she’d die before admitting it, felt a warmth in her stomach at hearing someone else’s voice. Even if everything it said was ridiculous. It was almost nice to be able to say she wasn’t completely alone. She tried to hold on to that feeling, very tightly, every time she got the urge to murder him. It got worse when he started asking questions.

“Why does it matter?”

“Way I see it, we’ve got quite a long travel in front of us, my lady. We should get to know one another, don’t you think?” He had that ornery lilt in his voice, like a toddler about to do something he knows he shouldn’t. 

“No.”

“Come on, Brienne,” he said her name like it was a dirty word. “You’re about as boring as you are ugly, you know that?”

“Thanks.”

She had tried to ignore him, but as expected that did nothing to deter him and she decided it was easier to just indulge him than to fight it. And that’s how the day passed. 

Jaime asked questions, and she gave the bare minimum of an answer to satisfy him. 

Where are you from?

How old are you?

How many of those things have you killed? 

“What were you doing? Before?” He was a few steps ahead of her, and seemed to be trying to walk and balance on the strip of yellow paint marking the middle of the road. A toddler indeed.

“I taught classes at a gym.”

“Like a pole dancing thing? Please say it was a pole dancing thing. I bet that would be a site to see.” The way he smirked, she knew it was meant to be a joke. She knew what she looked like. She knew the image of her awkwardly large body in any sexual context, much less wrapped around a pole, must have been hilarious to him. She’d heard that kind of stuff her whole life and she was used to it by now. For the most part. 

“Self defense. Boxing,” she bit out, though she said it carefully. Letting him know he got under her skin would just make it worse. She wouldn’t be able to stand seeing the satisfaction on his face again. 

“Ah. That makes much more sense.” Everything he said, he found a way to make it sound like an insult. 

She buried her nose deeper into the scarf around her neck and hoped her angry blush just looked like a clod flush from the wind.

“I was in the army, since you’re just begging me to know.” 

Imagining the irritating man balancing on a strip of paint in front of her in the army, respecting authority and taking orders didn’t seem like the match she would have expected. It didn’t seem like a match at all, and she had to laugh to herself. 

“What’s one thing from Before you miss?”

It was an interesting question as she thought about it. There were so many things to miss now. Everything about her life now was complete shit. She’d even take the bad parts of her previous life over her best days now. Sometimes it all seemed pointless. Dragging on and being miserable, but she never was one to give up. Maybe she was still alive just because she was too stubborn and pig headed to die already.

“Coffee,” was the answer she gave.

“Lousy. I miss my heating unit,” he sighed.

“Bad television.”

“Good television,” he countered. 

“I miss my job.” 

“You really have the worst answers to these questions, you know that?” He spun around on his pretend balance beam to look at her as he walked backwards. “You know what I miss the most though?”

“I’m really dying to know actually,” she deadpanned back, giving him her most obviously uninterested expression.

“Sex.” He looked right in her eyes as he said it and winked. Immediately, she barred her mind from imagining or even considering his stupid handsome face, and probably equally as handsome body, doing anything close to something that could be perceived as sexual. Except the thought of not thinking about Jaime having sex was just as jarring in itself and she could feel the blood rush to her face. _Damn him._

He let out a loud, wolfish laugh and spun around again. 

Killing him would have been so much easier.

 

 

When they spotted the old barn a little ways off the road, Brienne decided it was as good as they’d get to sleep for the night. She took off towards it and left Jaime to follow. 

The doors were long gone and there was a considerable portion of the roof that was now on the ground beneath it, but there was still straw in one corner with enough wall left around it to block the wind. The smell wasn’t the best.

He complains immediately. “Oh my god, it smells like shit in here. No, worse. It smells like shit that died.”

“I can always tie you up outside if you would prefer.”

“Will I be naked?”

They settled in and she allowed him a can of fruit cocktail and a few of her olives out of pity. Shit, she thought, the food was going to disappear twice as fast now. 

“Where were you? After it happened I mean? Or have you been by yourself this whole time?” Unlike his questions earlier in the day, this one felt like a serious one. Like maybe he actually wanted to know her answer and not just use it as a chance to laugh at her.

“A police station.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Not like that. My neighbor, her cousin was an officer. She thought it would be safer,” she swallowed. The olive turned to dust on her tongue. “You?”

“Military compound.”

“What happened?”

“It’s gone.” He didn’t elaborate, looking down at the empty can in his hands to avoid her eyes, but she understood. Things found a way to fall apart a lot easier these days. 

“Me too,” she whispered. It was all gone. 

She finished her food and tied him to a beam shortly after, much to his chagrin, and fell asleep in the hay.

 

When she woke up in the night, it was to Jaime twitching and whimpering in his sleep. She thought about waking him from the nightmare for a second, but he fell quiet again after a few moments and she’s pulled back into her own dark sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a little shorter, but she's dense y'all
> 
> *warning: past cersei/jaime content

The next day went much the same. They started out early and Brienne decided to forget eating and save their food for that night, which immediately put Jaime in a fowl mood. He was more insulting, more irritating. The longer the day got, the colder the air got, the worse he got. 

They found a car that had driven off the road into a tree below. Jaime broke the window with his elbow and she took care of its passenger. But the car was empty and he kicked at the tires before walking away. She sighed and followed.

Her stomach rumbled. His voice got shorter.

He mocked her and she hated him. She hated his handsome face, and the way his lips twisted when he sneered at her. She hated the insults he regurgitated at her that she’d heard since she was a child and old enough to be considered ugly or weird. She hated that he set her blood boiling just because he could. She hated how he could whistle and float away because he didn’t care. 

It wasn’t fair such an angelic man would be so rotted inside. 

 

“And really how did a man like _you_ end up in the armed services?” she fired back at him, tired of playing lame and quiet to his barbed wire tongue. “I can’t imagine it was a love of authority or discipline.”

“A man like me.” He laughed and it was bitter around the edges like old coffee. “Yeah, that was because I was fucking my sister.”

She stopped moving and fumbled through her memory checking to clarify that she’d heard him right. He had to be kidding. No one could throw away such a bold statement so flippantly if it was true. 

“Well,” he interjected, “step-sister technically.” His voice was so thick with rancid humor she almost choked on it. It was a venom, sweet like syrup coating her mouth.

“You can’t be serious,” she squeaked. 

He looked over his shoulder at her and his eyes were mirthless. “Oh quite serious.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that. What the hell could she say? What was the proper response to such a confession? It wasn’t common etiquette to learn how to respond when someone tells you they joined the army because they were sleeping with their sister. She found herself only able to sputter and stare. “I- How- I don’t-” Was she dizzy?

The laugh was cold on his lips. “Yeah, that’s usually the response.”

They both stopped talking after that, but she could see the tension in his shoulders the rest of the day.

 

The next few days weren’t much better. If anything they were worse, but they didn't talk about it.

They went several days without coming across another shelter or food source. Their canned goods ran out. The cold was devastating on their bodies and their moral. It chewed their bones raw and spit them back out in the wrong order. 

Jaime got quieter, hunger having driven his mouth shut. It felt almost perverse the watch him silent and humorless. 

Brienne got tired and then she got sick. Pressure built slowly behind her eyes and through her skull. Her nose was raw, and her eyes wept and dripped. Her body shook a little more from exhaustion every day. Jaime didn’t notice. If he did, he didn’t ask. Or more likely he didn’t care enough to want to. 

They ate tree bark and Jaime dug up worms where the ground was soft enough. 

On the fourth day of it, as she was about to scream out loud from the pounding hammers and drill singing in her head and the knives in her stomach, they found another car. This one was bigger and just barely driven off the side of the tarred surface. It was as empty as the first (sans the driver left behind) but Jaime insisted they stop and rest before she ‘fucking died on her feet’. He didn’t want the trouble.

She protested as she curled up in the back seat, but inside she was grateful for the chance to get some rest out of the cold. She’d never tell him that though.

 

When next she opened her eyes it was dark and her belly hurt. Her head felt lighter, but the pressure still pounded at her temples. She smashed the heel of her hand into her forehead as she sat up.

Jaime’s head popped over the passenger seat in front of her, barely visible in the dark. “Feel any better?” 

She shook her head miserably. 

“Here, these were in the glovebox.” He tossed her a small bottle of Tylenol and she felt like crying. Food was hard enough to come by, medicine was harder. I was something close to a miracle that he’d found them.

“Water?”

“Oh, yeah,” he gave her the water bag. She swallowed the pills and gulped desperately for the rest of the water, letting it wash down her throat and quench the heat in her veins. She could feel it spread through her torso to her very fingers. Droplets ran down her neck.. Her skin was too warm and her body felt too cold. 

Jaime stayed quiet as she drank and ran her sleeve under her neck to wipe away the escaped dribble. She handed the empty bag back to him with mild embarrassment.

“Thanks,” she whispered.

It was quiet in the dark. 

They didn’t move, but she could hear him breathing. It was soft and it made her feel just a tiny bit warmer hearing it. It was weird to notice how she had missed the simple sound of another person breathing. The sound of someone else living. She didn’t think about how it was Jaime, or how they were existing on the edge of hatred. She just thought about how she wasn’t alone. 

He cleared his throat and she jumped. “Um,” she heard him fidget. “Who’s Renly?”

She thought she may have gasped. She knew her body went rigid as stone. Just at the mention of his name, she felt the ache behind her ribs grow into a gaping hole for the first time in a while. She swallowed back the velvet in her throat. Why would he fucking say that?

“You said his name. In your sleep.”

_Fucking fever._

Oh Renly. It was a pain she had thought forgotten, but it was still there as fresh as the last time she broke it open. He was her deepest scar.

“Never mind,” he mumbled. 

“Someone I knew Before. And After.” Jaime didn’t speak. She could leave it at that. She didn’t owe him her tale after all. But it was Renly, and what if she was the last person alive to remember who he was? She wanted to share that at least. Maybe if she told someone, the pain of it wouldn’t be so unbearable.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends Before, well, ever really. I guess, I learned to keep to myself growing up. Kids could be cruel when they wanted to be. And with me it seemed like they always wanted to be. I know what I looked like. Look like. I’m not blind or stupid. By the time I got to college, I was used to it. It was just a routine I went through. It died down after high school. But people would still laugh, they would still point. They still found something funny about it. You’ve proven that much.

“Before it all went to shit, I only knew him from the gym. He came in once a week or something like that. I taught the boxing classes and turns out a lot of meathead guys don’t really like being taught by women. He was nice though. He was always nice to me. I guess that’s all it took for me to get a stupid crush, just someone being nice to me.” She hated how pathetic she sounded. Like a sad little girl. Poor ugly Brienne fell for the one guy who ever showed her kindness.

“After, he was at the police station when I got there. I guess he was an officer. I didn’t even know that beforehand. I didn’t know him. But he had taken charge of everything inside. He tried to keep order. I think he really wanted to keep people safe. He would check in, with everybody, but he made sure I had water sometimes. That people weren’t giving me a hard time. Dumb stuff.”

Jaime stayed silent. She couldn’t even hear him breathing now. 

“A few months in, we ran out of food. I mean we were expecting it eventually. We’d already picked all the nearby buildings clean, all the safe areas close enough to us. But there was a corner store a few blocks east and Renly figured we’d get lucky there. Except, the east side of town was where _they_ were the most active. There were hordes. But it would be worth it for the food, that’s what we told ourselves. I was the first to volunteer. I was so naive. We all were, but Renly knew it was worth it. Five of us went. Only Renly and I made it inside. I don’t even remember their names, the three of them that didn’t. Is that terrible?

“We got the food, filled up a few bags, and we were gonna leave right after, but they had all surrounded the place. There were too many for just the two of us to get through. So one day became two, we were just stuck in there waiting. I think Renly started to lose it a little. He wanted to leave and get back, he felt trapped. So the third morning we left. I went first to clear some sort of path, but… I guess I wasn’t paying attention. Or I wasn’t fast enough.

“I didn’t see it bite him. I turned around when he cried out. There was already a piece of his neck gone by then. The blood was just everywhere. I dragged him back, but he was gone.”

She shivered remembering it. How warm his blood was between her fingers, how red, and the way his whole body shook. There were tears in his eyes when he had looked at her. And then he just stopped looking at her. 

It was like reliving a nightmare.

“When I got back to the station it was empty. I don’t know what happened. If they got tired of waiting for us. If something else happened. And then I left.” She scrubbed her sleeve angrily over her eyes. She didn’t want anyone to see her cry, to see her weak, least of all him. He mocked her enough as it was, she didn’t need him turning this into a joke as well. The tragedy of it was enough pain on it’s own. 

“I don’t think it was really love. I didn’t even know him. I guess I wouldn’t know the difference, but at the time I thought myself in love with him,” she had to chuckle at herself. “I was such an idiot. Just a stupid, young idiot. He told me he was gay when we were stuck inside. When he was choking and dying, he was asking for Loras. He wanted his boyfriend and I was the only thing there and I couldn’t do a thing. I just fucking held him.”

Everything hurt so much.

 

Jaime listened to her sob story and he hated himself a little bit more. He could feel the pain of it in her voice and he hurt. Sometimes his own self hatred and his own internal wrath made him forget he wasn’t the only person left who had suffered. He definitely wasn’t the only one to lose something. Someone. 

He listened to her and he felt fucking bad. 

What it must be like to be cared about like that. What it must be like to be someone she cared about. 

He has no fucking idea why he said it. Maybe it was his own tragedy clawing at the walls of his stomach. Maybe it was the veil of darkness that made him feel brave. Maybe it was the strain in her voice as she tried not to cry that broke something open, but the word tumbled out and he didn’t feel like stopping it and he just started talking.

“Cersei.”

“What?” It was barely a confused whisper. 

“My step-sister,” he clarified.

“Oh.”

“Our parents got married when we were twelve, but I don’t think we ever really felt like siblings. We had the same birthday even. Cersei always said it was because we were meant to be one person, split into two bodies, that we completed each other. It felt romantic then, like it was just the two of us against the world. Affection was in short supply growing up, with my father. So I guess when she finally gave it, I clung to her. Latched on to the way I felt. 

“We fucked as soon as we knew how. And then we didn’t stop. I loved her. I really think I did. Or do, maybe. She was everything beautiful and light in my life. And god, was she beautiful. Even when she was cruel or distant, I loved her. No one, but her.” 

She had consumed him. Even now, he ached at the memory of her. She was like a virus, but he could never help it. He had never been strong enough to even want to fight it.

“When we were 18, Tywin came home early from work and found us. Walked right in the room. Our dear dad didn’t take to kindly to his children humping like bunnies behind his back. Really what father would? He was disgusted. So, he enlisted me. And I left the next week. She wrote to me when she could. Long, poetic things about her body and her heart and her love.”

The whole time he spoke he could feel her round, cow eyes on him in the dark. It made him feel dirty and bad, but he wanted to tell her anyway. He wanted her to know, for some reason. Maybe he hoped she’d hate him more for it. 

Maybe he hoped she wouldn’t.

“Turns out war was really the only thing I was actually good at. So I decided my father wouldn’t win this time, and if I had to be there I was going to be the best at it. Fuck him, I would be great at something, even if it was a really shitty something. I think even in the defiance of it all, I really hoped he would still be proud of me. 

“The next time I saw her was three years later at her wedding. We snuck away during the reception and I fucked her in the coat closet. I signed up for another tour the next day. And that’s how it went. Until it ended.”

He didn’t cry, but he wanted to. He wanted to weep for her.

“Are you hoping you’ll find her? South?”

“I think a part of me is.”

“Ok.”

He had expected her to rage, to call him disgusting and storm away. He wanted her to talk to him with disappointment thick in her rough voice. Scold him for his sins. “That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“You aren’t going to yell?” He as waiting for her to yell.

“Why?”

_Because I deserve it, he wanted to say. Because you’re good and you’re just and I’m not. You’re supposed to hate it. Hate me. Because I just told you I’ve been in love with my own fucking step-sister and you don’t seem to have noticed._

She wasn’t supposed to make him feel better and he wasn’t supposed to want her to. God, why did he want to let her? 

_Why do I even care?_

“I just need some fresh air for a second.” She stepped out of the car and he thought to himself that she probably just wanted to get away from him. 

He was a stain.


	5. Chapter 5

They were quiet. 

If it had been a day before, Brienne would have gladly welcomed the silence, welcomed the break in Jaime’s never ending monologue of ridicule. But after their conversation last night… after that the silence felt sticky. It felt unnatural to walk beside the road to just the sound of the wind and the ground crunching under her boots. 

Her fever had broken in the night and they left the old car as soon as she was awake and coherent. And once they got to the road, surrounded by nothing, but the quiet, she realized she didn’t really have anything to say anyway.

In truth, it had made her stomach roll. His story. The idea it put in her head. She didn’t know what she would even be able to say if she found her voice. How do you exist around someone that just told you they had a romantic, and very sexual relationship with their sister? _Step-sister._

Her empty gut did somersaults at the thought of it, but then there was his voice, and the look in his eyes when he spoke. 

He did love her. She could tell. The way his words softened, and his eyes looked for something far away in the distance. He had loved her, really loved her, for whatever it was worth.

Not how she thought she’d loved Renly.

She could almost find the humor in it to laugh at the pair of them. The ugly girl, fool enough to fall for the first man to treat her with kindness, only for him to actually be gay. And the rotten bastard, idiot enough to love his own sister. 

Their acquaintance, if it could be called that much, got stranger the longer they were around each other. 

She didn’t miss his voice, she didn’t. Nor did she miss the insults it carried on it like poison and honey. But the total absence of it felt unnatural. It felt wrong.

She blew out a sigh. 

And she quicken her pace to step past him.

“You smell like shit. I can’t stomach standing downwind of it,” she muttered.

She caught his smirk. It caught the corner of his lip like a hook snagging on a thread. 

The wind wasn’t even blowing that direction.

 

 

“Are those _people?"_ The shock in her voice lifted Jaime’s gaze from his feet to the road ahead of him where Brienne had paused.

Just over the crest of the hill ahead of them, there were indeed three figures stepping out of the treeline. He came up beside her and watched. 

They should head for the trees, he knew. He was smarter than that, didn’t matter if they were dead or alive, you didn’t take stupid chances and you didn’t trust people. He was still alive because he wasn’t stupid, and maybe he was selfish and maybe that made him a shit, but he was still breathing to live with it.

“Do you think they’ve already seen us?” she whispered.

The figure on the far left pointed in their direction. “I’d wager yes.” His hand went to the holster at his hip before he remembered the damned wench of a woman still had his gun. He really would have to get that back. His fingers danced along the handle of his remaining knife instead. 

They got closer, while Jaime and Brienne stayed in place.

They were all three fairly small men, easily taken individually, he thought from a distance. The first, short and fat and bald. The second, thin and wiry with an angry nose. The third was taller, with dark hair and a mustache. As he studied them, Jaime felt his stomach turn to ice.

“Shit.”

“What?” Brienne whispered, her large eyes blinked.

“Fucking shit.” He raked a hand through his hair and looked around frantically. Was there enough cover in the trees to outrun them safely? Did they even have the energy to? He saw the meaty one draw a gun. Yeah, they should have run.

“Jaime. What did you do?” He was almost offended. Or he would have been if she wasn’t right.

“Um, remember when I _tried _to rob you? Yeah, well, I succeeded in robbing _them._ ”__

__“You have got to be kidding. Fuck. You are such an _ass_.” _ _

__They didn’t notice the fourth man exiting the trees behind them._ _

__If Jaime was any smarter he would’ve remembered knocking out four men instead of three, and he would’ve remembered to stay aware of his surroundings, and he would’ve been more worried about Brienne. But Jaime Lannister, unfortunately was not a smarter man, and the fourth member, the one with the tiny eyes and the sandy beard, came up behind them with his gun already lifted before either of them took notice._ _

__“Move and she gets a hole through the middle that ugly face of hers.” In that second, as he looked at her, he didn’t think he had ever seen eyes so blue. Or so afraid._ _

__It made him bristle._ _

__They weren’t good men. They weren’t honorable and they weren’t kind and they weren’t trustworthy. They were vile and they’d kill him and leave her alive just long enough to play with her. And for some reason, just the thought of it, of them anywhere fucking near her, set his bones on fire. They’d break her. She was a good person. She was probably the last good person._ _

__And he was about to do something entirely fucking stupid._ _

__He sent her a look. He begged her, pleaded with her, to just trust him on this one thing. She didn’t have to trust him on anything ever again, but she needed to let him do this._ _

__She swallowed._ _

___If Tyrion could see me now,_ he thought. _ _

__“Hello boys. Good to see you again,” his voice stayed light. He coated his throat in sugar and spat out sweet lies. Pick and prod and poke at the soft underbelly of their patience until the gun turned on him, and away from her._ _

__“Shut your fucking mouth, prick.”_ _

__“Terribly sorry our last meeting ended so soon. Before we even got a chance to properly get to know one another. Glad you found some spare clothing though.”_ _

__“I’m warning you,” the man ground out. His voice was sawdust._ _

___He’d find the nerve he needed and he’d dance on it it. Pluck at it like a string and hear it fucking sing._ _ _

__The other three were almost to them._ _

__They all had murder bleeding from their eyes. Murder, and something worse. Hunger. And not for him. He saw their eyes turn to Brienne and he could smell the stench in the air around them. They were starving wolves and they just found something to bite down on. For some foreign, bleeding reason, it made him angrier._ _

__He didn’t stop to analyze it. He didn’t stop at all._ _

___Something stupid indeed,_ he thought. _ _

__“Warning didn’t help much last time either if I recall.”_ _

__The large idiot behind them moved, and so did he._ _

__He spun, knocking Brienne to the side with one arm, and grabbing for the hand holding the gun with the other._ _

__Four seconds. Four shots. Four bodies._ _

__One, two, three, four in perfect executed sequence._ _

__Then it was over, and they were still alive._ _

__Brienne was looking back and forth between the bodies. The bodies and him. There were too many emotions playing out across her face for him to grasp on to any one of them long enough. She looked like she was either about to throw up or cry._ _

__“What the fuck, Jaime?” she whispered._ _

__“What?”_ _

__“You killed them,” her voice was low enough, the wind could have carried it away._ _

__“I killed- Yeah, of course I fucking killed them. What else was I supposed to do? They had a gun to your head. They were gonna kill us.”_ _

__“Because you robbed them in the first place.”_ _

__The blood in his veins was replaced with fire. Rage, anger, disbelief, maybe even hurt, was building behind his chest. His ribs cracked open with the force of it. She was upset with him. Everything was his fault. It was always his fucking fault no matter what he did and he wanted to scream. He had saved her life, and she ridiculed him and he didn’t understand._ _

__He never understood what people wanted from him. He could never make the right choices, it seemed._ _

__“You think I shouldn’t have done it? You think they were ‘good’ people and I’m the bad guy?”_ _

__“I didn’t say-”_ _

__“There aren’t good people left! I keep trying to get that through your thick fucking head. These guys? They would’ve put a bullet between my eyes and they wouldn’t have blinked. They would’ve taken you back and passed you around for a night or two until they got sick of what’s between your legs. So go ahead and sit with honor and make me the bad guy, but the world’s fucked. And you’re alive right now because I can fucking recognize it.”_ _

__The words tore out of his lungs til he was breathless from the force of them. Chest heaving, he looked down at her. She gaped at him. Why had he even given a shit about her in the first place? Why did any of it even matter to him?_ _

__Looking at her made him want to pull his hair out._ _

__“That’s not what I meant. I’m-”_ _

__“Yeah,” he sniffed. “Sure.”_ _

__

__

__It was silent once again. They slept amongst the trees and he didn’t look at her when she tied the cord around his wrists._ _

__One step forward, twelve steps back._ _

__

__

__When they found the subdivision, Brienne thought she might weep. Hunger had been licking at her bones for days. It had chewed her up and spit her back out half eaten. Her very bones were hollow and dead inside the packaging of her skin._ _

__The appearance of the former civilization and the possibility of a stocked pantry sent a jolt through her._ _

__She even heard Jaime sigh in relief._ _

__It was a graveyard. Empty homes stood like skeletons in the shadows. They were the bare bones picked free of their flesh and left behind to rot. Doors swung ajar in the wind. Windows were cracked or missing. Cars were abandoned in their driveways. Leaves and trash littered the ground. It made her shiver._ _

__“Start on the left, work around?” Jaime only nodded. She wanted to hit something. Him maybe. Herself._ _

__A few of _them_ ambled around the sidewalks and porches, but they were starving too and they were slow. It didn’t take much._ _

__The first house was empty. Cabinets had been left thrown open. Furniture was smashed and in disarray. There wasn’t a single edible thing left behind. Whoever had left the home, had picked the carcass dry when they went._ _

__The second house had a dead dog locked in a closet, the corpse thin and mangled from starvation. Upstairs, two bodies had decorated their bedroom walls and white sheets in red and brown gore. If she’d had anything left in her stomach to throw up, she would have. Jaime slammed the door as they left._ _

__The third one was locked and he kicked that door down. The inside was clean enough. If it hadn’t been for the layer dust coating everything and the musty smell, she could have almost pretended someone still lived there. But there was still no food._ _

__“Fuck!” Jaime yelled when the last cupboard was filled with only cobwebs. He scrubbed at his haggard face. Then, he threw the toaster across the room and into a wall._ _

__“Jaime,” she warned. He couldn’t lose it now. Not now._ _

__“What?!” There was humor in his voice, but not the fun kind. The sharp kind. The kind she was likely to cut herself on._ _

__“Calm down, okay?”_ _

__“Calm down? I’m hungry, Brienne. I’m so hungry and this place is shit,” he punctuated the word with a kick to the useless fridge. “It’s all shit. And you. God, you won’t just leave me alone. And you look at me with those stupid fucking cow eyes like I’m diseased. Like I’m the bad guy and you’ll catch it if you get to close and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand any of it. It’s the end of the world and I’m stuck with your ugly, judgemental face staring at me every time I do anything. It’s worse than being alone! ”_ _

__She stood stone still and let him unload the bullets into her chest. “I’m sorry.”_ _

__“You’re not. You hate me,” he really laughed that time. He was looking at her in a way that made her skin burn. She felt like it would bubble and slide off her bones. “I just want to sleep in a bed and eat food made for people. I want to see my brother, I want to see Cersei. But I have canned cat food and you and it makes me angry. I’m so tired of it.”_ _

__“You’re pathetic.”_ _

__“Yeah? And you're insufferable. Maybe Renly got himself bit on purpose to get rid of you.”_ _

__She spun and swung at his face and enjoyed the crunch his nose made when her fist connected with it. He collapsed against the counter holding his face as blood dripped down his chin and through his fingers. When he looked at her his eyes were dead._ _

__“I can check the rest on my own,” she spat at him. “Clean up your fucking tantrum.”_ _

__She grabbed her pack and was out the door._ _

__

__

__She thought about leaving him. When she stomped out the door, when she found the cellar, when she watched the sun paint the sky with watercolors, she thought about taking her food and walking straight past the house, back to the road, and leaving him behind._ _

__It was easier alone. She was better alone._ _

__Wasn’t she?_ _

__

__

__Jaime cleaned up the fucking mess._ _

__He only spent an hour after Brienne stormed out feeling sorry for himself. Then he just started feeling sorry. He found questionable paper towels in the cabinet to clean the blood off himself and shove up his nose. It made his eyes water and his face burn. She definitely hadn’t pulled the punch._ _

__He picked up the various things he had thrown around the room like a jackass. Swept away the broken bits with his feet. Wiped up the drops of his blood on the floor._ _

__He checked the bedrooms, the bathrooms, and found a few leftover items of clothing big enough for him, and Brienne. His reflection in the bathroom mirror made him flinch. He was skinnier than the last time he’d remembered seeing himself. Sunken cheeks, overgrown hair. The center of his face was red and puffy, and his eyes were already starting to bruise. Bloody chunks of paper towel poked out of both nostrils. He looked like some sad fuck right out of Fight Club._ _

__The sun was setting as he sat back at the table and thought about how stupid he was. It took a lot of time. He had lashed out once again in his anger and his discomfort. He couldn’t yell at the world for screwing him over, but she was there and it was easier to yell at her. Even if her heavy gaze burned him. Even if he was honest when he said he hated the way she looked at him._ _

__He did. Her blue eyes burned a hole right through him every time she looked at him, with her judgement and her disapproval. It was like living back with his father. Being looked at like that. He couldn't stand it._ _

__But he hated it more coming from her and he just couldn’t figure out why. Why did he care for her approval or, god forbid, her friendship? Nothing made sense to him then. Not her or himself or the world in general._ _

__The sky was darkening outside the window, fading from reds to blues to blacks._ _

__Brienne was still gone._ _

__It made him restless. Her absence for such an extended time made his chest tight with anxiety. Wouldn’t she be back by dark? It was a stupid idea to stay out there after dark, there were too many shadows and ghosts in every window. She was dim, he thought, but not that dim._ _

__Or had she left?_ _

__The thought of is was a fist around his heart suddenly. Would she have left him? Had be been cruel enough to drive her away and back down the road alone? His mouth felt dry at the thought._ _

__It would save him the trouble though wouldn’t it? To be rid of her and free on his own again. Away from her judgement and her rules and the boring sight of her. He was better off alone as it were._ _

__Alone._ _

__Was he really ready to be alone again? He had gotten used to the woman. The way he could antagonize her and watch her blush, it entertained him. Maybe it had warmed up some cold part of him too._ _

__No, he didn’t want her to leave him. He didn’t want to be by himself anymore. He wanted to keep her around, he supposed. _At least until I can trade her in for someone else.__ _

__There was a creak on the porch. A footstep._ _

__He was up with his hand on his new borrowed gun in a second. Poised and ready. The knob moved. The door opened. Brienne stepped through. He felt the breath go out of him. The anxiety lifted from his shoulders and the fist around his chest released._ _

__She looked at him and her expression was blank. There wasn’t even a trace of the resentment or annoyance she usually had when she looked at him. Like she didn’t care enough anymore to be upset by him anymore. It made his spine feel crinkled and broken in his back._ _

__She lifted her pack and dropped it down on the table, heavy and full. “I already ate one,” she said, shrugging her jacket off. It was full of cans and jars. And not of cat food this time. Actual food like beans and corn and peaches._ _

__“You really only ate one of them?” he sighed, scanning her body and trying for the humor he’d had before he pissed her off this time. Go back to then._ _

__She only sighed, her massive shoulders sagging with the weight of it. The stained sleeves of her henley covered her hands like mittens as she scrubbed them across her soft face. The knuckles of her right hand, the one she’d hit him with, were purple. She looked completely over it. The world, her day, him. She was buckling under the pressure and the insistence of it all._ _

__“I’m tired, Jaime.” He could see the truth of it in her eyes. He regretted his part in all of it, then. He wished he could shoulder some of it for her instead of causing it. _I’m always causing it,_ he thought. _ _

__His mouth opened to say something, but he choked on everything he meant to say._ _

__“Eat whatever you want. There’s a whole cellar.” She turned and left down the hall. He heard a door open and shut. She hadn’t even bothered to tie him up._ _

__He really wished fucking up wasn’t so easy for him._ _


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's a long one, but hopefully worth it? lots about to go down my guys

Jaime was still at the table when she woke up the next morning, with his socked feet rested on the edge and her map in his hands. An empty can of fruit sat next to him. His face looked even worse than it did the night before, the center of it the same black and purple color as her knuckles. Only now, there was no paper shoved up his nostrils. 

He looked up at her from his map briefly and the tightness behind his eyes made her wonder if he ever moved from his seat or slept at all during the night. If he were anyone else she might have felt bad for hitting him. Right then, she didn’t.

His eyes flitted away and back to the map quickly enough, almost like he was scared of her. Or ashamed, like he should’ve been.

“I think we should stay a few days. Get our strength back.” The way he said it, she knows he meant her specifically; even if it had been days since her fever passed. “There’s plenty of houses to check, and food. We could use the rest.”

“Okay.” It’s a smart idea, but she didn’t feel like giving him the satisfaction of knowing she thought that. She was still bitter.

They were inside, but the air was still chilly without any heating and Brienne felt it tickle her arms through the thin material of her henley. She shivered and folded her them over her chest, stupidly remembering she hadn’t put her bra back on before she left the room, not used to being comfortable enough at night to take it off in the first place. 

Jaime’s eyes traveled down to her chest and then swiftly away again before she could form an opinion on how it made her feel. They left a warm trail down her neck though. It made her twitch in place.

“I’ll be back.” 

She changed hurriedly and decided to head out and check a few more of the houses immediately. Jaime didn’t stop her.

Really, she just didn’t know how to be around him. Again. Every time she thought she had him pinned down, with anger and resentment usually, he’d get a look or he’d say something she didn’t expect and she would find herself once again scrambling to find a box to fit him into. He didn’t seem to fit into any of them. Except maybe ‘annoying’. He always fit into that one.

He was an asshole and he was selfish and pessimistic and mean when he wanted to be. 

But at the same time, he had a warm laugh, and he saved her life, and was funny when the mood was right (and when it wasn’t), and he had enough love tied up inside him to fill a hundred hearts, even if it was only for his sister. And when she looked at him, she figured he hated himself in a way she never really could.

He was a contradiction and he belonged in a box all on his own, wrapped in barbed wire and swirling, red ribbons and labeled only _Jaime._

She hadn’t meant to look at him like she did. In the way that, as it turned out, made him seeth. She truly hadn’t. And she hadn’t meant to blame him for killing those men on the road. It was obvious they couldn’t have done anything else if they had wanted to live, but the shock of it had startled her and she could think of nothing else to do. Her mind was too slow processing it and finding words to say and he had jumped to his own defense like a man used to the blame. 

She had felt bad about it, until he brought up Renly because he knew it would hurt her. And then she was back to anger. She just wished it was easier. Emotions and people, they were hard things for her to get her mind around sometimes. She grew up outside of it all and now she was forced to coexist with the most confusing person left around and he hadn’t made it any easier.

So, she wasted most of her day idling through houses longer than she really needed to and trying to sort out the tangled thoughts in her brain. She took in the houses. She let herself look at the photographs. They made her miss her family. 

Gal and her dad, it had been so long since she’d seen their faces or heard their laughs, even before everything happened. 

She looked at a family photo above a fireplace and thought of their last family Christmas at home when her father had taken a blurry picture of them at breakfast and it was terrible, but he framed it because it was them and they were happy.

She found a pair of crutches in a bedroom closet and thought of the time she had broken her ankle during field hockey and Gal had decorated her cast in doodles so no one could tell he was the only one to actually sign it.

She saw the bookshelf filled with old paperbacks and thought of all the stories their father would read to them as children of knights and dragons and wars for princesses and how she had always wanted to be the hero. 

She walked through the house that used to be a home and thought of the family she had lost and left behind and she ached. 

Jaime was gone when she got back, but his stuff was still at the table so she didn’t bother worrying. She just left the few things she collected with the rest of the stuff and went to the room she had slept in to hopefully find something else to wear that didn’t smell like the apocalypse and actually fit her shoulders.

A soft knock behind her broke her thoughts. She hadn’t even heard him come back, but Jaime stood in the doorway looking, of all things, sheepish. He shuffled slightly on his feet like a child about to tell their parent something bad. She blinked at him expectantly and prepared herself for whatever he could have to say.

Maybe he would say he thought this was where they should part ways. Or that he had accidentally eaten all the food in a massive fit of hunger.

Instead, he held out his arm and offered her a shirt. It was a blue woolen flannel and it looked warm.

“It’s a truce. I’m- I apologize. For being, well for being a dick, I guess, and upsetting you.” 

She let him soak in her silence longer than she probably needed to, just to make a point.

“Have you ever apologized to anyone before? You’re kind of shit at it,” but she said it with a slight smile and she took the shirt from his hands. 

“Have you ever accepted an apology before?” She wanted to retort, but when she thought about it, she couldn’t actually remember the last time someone had the decency to offer her an apology. And there Jaime was, trying his best at it. Even if his best wasn’t great.

“Thanks,” she mumbled and hoped to god she wasn’t blushing.

He shrugged and turned to leave.

“Wait. I’m sorry too.” He leaned back and she saw his eyebrows pull together, like he never expected her to apologize either. But here they were. They just kept surprising each other.

“On the road, with the men. I shouldn’t have- I don’t blame you for it. You saved me, I know that. I shouldn’t have been mad, I wasn’t really. I was just surprised and I’m sorry for what I said. Or for how I looked at you.”

The air between them felt lighter now, and softer. The tension gone and it was easier for them both to breathe now. 

He nodded and swallowed, and for the first time he looked out of place where he stood. Neither of them were really very good at any of this. This coexisting thing. This, dare she call it, friend thing. 

“Thanks for the shirt,” she said again because it really did feel warm and soft in her hands.

“It matched your eyes,” he played it off like that was obviously the only reason he’d give it to her. But it was the the way he looked at her as he said it that surprised her and pulled at her stomach. And it left her gaping like some poor fish caught out of water. 

It made him smile. Of course it did. This time it reached his eyes. “It’s way too big for me anyway. Should fit you just fine though,” he threw over his shoulder as he walked away and she only rolled her eyes.

Maybe they’d be okay.

 

 

They stayed in the next couple days. Rain and sleet muddied the ground to shit and neither of them really wanted to step out into to poke through more abandoned houses for a can of tuna or some old socks. They were staying to rest anyway, and if he was being completely honest with himself, Jaime didn’t really want Brienne wandering about in the shitty weather a few days after she had recovered from a fever. 

So they stayed inside and forced themselves to occupy the same space in their newfound peace for the first time. He even managed to start a very small fire in the dusty little fireplace with a broomhandle and some old papers. 

She curled up in the armchair and he switched between lounging on the couch, sprawling on the floor, and pacing the length of the room. His body easily grew restless when he had nothing else to do and being cooped up inside, even when it was his own idea to stop and rest for a few days, was gnawing at his patience. 

 

He found a deck of cards in the desk upstairs and convinced her to play something with him after much begging. However, she quit after 3 games when she realized he was cheating.

 

“I spy something brown.”

“Is it that piece of dog shit in the corner?” he sighed.

“Yeah.”

“I spy something blue.”

“Is it my eyes?” she was the one to sigh this time.

“Yes,” and it made him grin. 

“You’re terrible at this, Jaime. I spy something yellow.”

 

She tries to read from a tattered little paperback he imagined she picked up on one of her solitary house searches. He wants to leave her in peace to enjoy it, he really does, but the silence and the boredom are too much. 

“Read to me.”

“What?” 

“I’m bored, Brienne and you’re too quiet. Read to me. Please?”

She read to him, but she made sure to huff and roll her eyes before she started. Just so he knew how much she didn’t want to. It was a rather dry tale of noble men rescuing beautiful women. Swords and sorcery and battles and good people doing good things. Unrealistic in his opinion. 

“I think I’d have been a good knight,” he mused, more to himself than to her. 

“You don’t have enough honor to be a knight.”

“Hey!”

 

“Is it alive?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm, is it a mammal?”

“No.”

“Is it a reptile?” 

“Yes!” 

“Is it big?”

“Yes. Very big,” he nodded enthusiastically. He was by far more entertained than she was, but he was glad she at least indulged him. “Last question. Guess.”

“Is it an alligator?”

“No!” he laughed. It felt nice. It made his insides warm and jumpy. “It was a dragon.”

“Jaime, dragons aren’t real. You can’t pick a dragon.”

 

“Let’s play cards again.”

“No, you’ll cheat.”

“I won’t cheat, I promise.”

“I don’t trust you to keep that promise.”

“That’s very mean, Brienne. I am a very trustworthy man.”

She snorted, but she played another game with him. 

He still cheated.

 

“Brienne?”

“Hm?”

“Are you sleeping out here?”

“Yeah. ‘ts warmer. Why?”

He didn’t tell her he had grown too used to her and now it was harder to fall asleep when she was far away.

 

It finally stopped raining, and the earth turned solid again, and they were both ready to leave the house and move about. Brienne wanted to get straight to business and check more of the houses, because of course she did. Jaime was just happy to have open space and a task to focus on. 

“Let’s make it a game,” he offered. 

“Does everything have to be a game?”

“No, but I rather think it should be. We split up, meet back here at dark, whoever finds the best stuff wins.”

She grumbled, but she agreed because she knew better than to argue with him at that point. He liked it when she let him win things.

She found a revolver and several boxes of bullets. 

He found a full bottle of malt whiskey.

They called it a tie, and that night they got drunk.

They both sat there, around the very tiny fire he had managed to conjure up again, passed the bottle back and forth, and shared a too big can of peaches. It was warm and it burned its way down his throat and into his belly, in the good way only whiskey could. He had really missed alcohol. 

It loosened the cords of his muscles that had grown tight and hard in the cold of the new world. It made him feel normal again, and for a few hours they talked like the world wasn’t dead outside the window and they were just friends. And he didn’t stop to think about how weird that was, given that they weren’t friends. They were barely over hating each other, but it felt nice to forget that and to pretend. So he just enjoyed it.

He notice the change in her too. The way her eyes glittered and the hard crease between her brows smoothed out. How she seemed less anxious and more soft. 

She looked very soft.

“In college, there were these guys. Just, stupid pretty boys in my calc class. They usually teased me, but everyone teased me so what was the big deal. Except then, one week, they started being nice to me. Little things. Flowers, flirting, asking to study. All stuff that’s probably normal for girls that aren’t… me.” She took a long swig from the bottle before she continued, sloppily wiping at her mouth after. 

“I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought they were being nice. Turns out, they all had a bet. To see who could sleep with me first and take my virginity.” 

It made him uncharacteristically angry. He felt the soft warmth the alcohol put in his chest turn to a fire that burned. And he realized he wanted to hit one of them. All of them. 

“I slept with one of them anyway, just to get it over with.” She took another gulp and passed him the bottle.

He only gaped at her. She didn’t say it like the painful thing it should’ve been. Like the painful thing it was. Then, the far off look in her eye cleared and she looked at him like she was about to share a dangerous secret.

“Then, I stole all the money he won in the bet and broke his nose.”

It made him laugh, really laugh, from his belly. “Of course you did.” His body shook with it. It felt so good to laugh again, and not in a malicious way. It felt good to laugh in the shared way of enjoying something with someone because they could.

She smiled at him too as they shared it. She smiled and it made her eyes crinkle in the corners and, he thought, objectively speaking, it was a nice smile. It was the kind of silly, sideways smile that was warm and stupid and he decided he liked it when she smiled. 

And suddenly, he wanted to tell her his story. He wanted to tell her everything. 

“When I was deployed, the second time, I had a squad leader. A lot older than me, seasoned, everyone really seemed to respect the guy, everything he’d seen. The king they called him. Made me feel lucky to serve with him, for him. Whatever it was.”

He didn’t look at Brienne. He was afraid if he looked at her, if he saw the look in her eyes, he’d lose his nerve.

“They were wrong. He was… God, the guy was a monster. He was mad. He’d execute prisoners by burning them alive. And he liked it. He’d sit there and he’d watch with a smile on his face and all of us just let him. It was our job so we just let him.” He could tell he was slurring his words, and that the warmth in his stomach had retreated to make way for the cold weight there now. 

But he kept going. He didn’t have a fucking clue why. He had never told anyone besides the people that needed to know, but he wanted to tell her. God, fucking save him, he wanted to tell her, even if he didn’t know why. He was drunk with the alcohol and the need to share himself. 

She saw the good in things, in everything. They were surviving in a hellscape on earth and she still found the good that was left when no one else bothered. Maybe he wanted her to see the worst of him, to hear the worst story he had to tell, and to find the good parts of him. If there were any left.

“One night, he was just fucking drunk. And he turned to me and he told me what he was going to. You see, he’d planted bombs the day before. All over the town. This whole town of innocent people, women, children, he’d planted bombs all over and he was going to detonate them all. Because he was sure they weren’t telling him everything. So he would blow them all up. And he laughed when he said it.

“When he went to leave, I shot him. When he didn’t die, I slit his throat.”

He remembered it clear as day, even in his drunken haze. He remembered the fire and the hatred in his eyes that night. And he remembered the blood on his hands. It haunted him. It was the ghost on his shoulder every waking minute of his life. 

“They pulled me from active duty for a desk job, but I wasn’t discharged. A favor for the disaster I prevented. But they didn’t tell anyone the truth. Not a single person. They called me ‘kingslayer’ behind my back.” Shameful tears collected in his eyes. That’s when he looked at her, ready to receive his final judgment. 

Her blue eyes were huge on her face. They were astonishing, he thought to himself. She licked her lips and he braced himself for the impact.

“That’s really fucked up.”

“Yeah,” he scoffed. He should have been prepared for it. It was what he had wanted, wasn’t it? To be laid bare before her and to be given judgement.

“Him, Jaime,” she adds. “Not you.”

And it tore his chest wide open. No one had ever said that to him before. His father had ridiculed him over the dishonor it brought to their family name. Tyrion had made a joke of it, as he did with most things. Cersei, she had never known how to comfort another human being, so she dismissed it and part of him along with it. But no one had heard the story of how he murdered a man he was supposed to protect, and sympathized with him. Not a single fucking one of them.

But she did.

“You did the right thing.” He almost didn’t hear her say it, caught up in his own shock.

He told his most horrifying tale to the best person he knew, and a person who was ready to hate him just days before for being his shithead self, a person that only wanted to see the good things. 

And she didn’t blame him. She looked at him and absolved him of his sin the moment she heard it, when everyone else had turned from him in disgust. 

Maybe that’s why he kissed her. Maybe it was the soft way she looked at him with her astonishing eyes. Maybe, or more probably, it was all the whiskey he’d swallowed, making him warm and impulsive and, frankly, stupid. It didn’t really matter why, he just kissed her.

She froze rigid at first, but only for a moment. The loneliness at the end of the world could make people hungry. And alcohol could make them reckless. 

Their lips were sloppy and urgent, but she tasted like whiskey and peaches and it made him even hungrier. He found himself reaching for her, desperate to touch any part of her that he could. To feel skin on his fingertips and hair between them. He was mad with it. He grasped at her hips, her shoulders, the curve of her neck. Anything to pull her closer. Feel something, someone, closer.

It had been so long since Cersei had touched him, since he’d held another body to him and he was starved for it. That’s what he’d tell himself tomorrow. That it was Cersei he missed and Cersei he wanted. But as he felt her mouth, open and warm against his, he didn’t think that at all. 

He only thought of the touch of skin, of how the brush of rough fingertips on the back of his neck sent a jolt through his body like a live wire. 

_She could almost be Cersei,_ he thought. _In the blur of alcohol and darkness and desire, she could almost be Cersei._

The thought was gone as quickly as it appeared.

Her shirt was off and they were on the floor before either of them even stopped to breathe. He looked down at her beneath him, at the confusion and hesitation that flashed across her face, and he thought of those stupid boys that played her in college. And the stupid boy she had thrown it away to just to get rid of it. And he decided he wanted to make her forget every single thing she remembered about him.

Because, truly, he was a vain man, and also because he was a horny drunk, and, maybe, a little bit because it’s what a tiny part of him thought she deserved. 

“Jaime,” she whispered to test the waters, but her voice was breathless and light and it only succeeded in setting every last inch of him on fire. 

And so he kissed her again. Deeper this time. More urgent. He wanted her. His body wanted her. He was alive with the electricity of it and he didn’t even fucking care. In that second she probably could’ve been anyone, with how lost in her he seemed to be. Drunk and blurry and sloppy. And warm.

He ran his hands up her sides. Her skin was so warm, so soft against him. Softer than he had ever expected for a woman so brusque and masculine in every other way. She shivered at his touch and arched her back against him. It made him smile.

He kissed down her neck and she gasped.

When she tugged at his hair, he couldn’t stop his groan. 

He was so lost in the feel of her, of touching and being touched again, that he didn’t even notice she was trying to say something.

“What?”

“Bed,” she said breathlessly.

“Bed,” he nodded.

They barely made it to the bedroom, stumbling and shedding clothes on their way, before gracelessly falling onto the mattress, giggling like they were both clumsy teenagers doing something stupid, as the alcohol dragged at their limbs.

He did make absolutely sure she came twice before they both pass out, sweaty and naked and drunk, under the sheets. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my mental breakdowns over braime can also be found at @trashy-lannister on tumblr


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shit goes down

Brienne woke up with a marching band in her head and cotton in her mouth. 

_Fucking alcohol._ There had been a reason she didn’t drink. 

It was too bright already without even opening her eyes and every aching part of her begged her to curl back under the covers and hide from the pain and the severity prodding at her. 

She would have indulged the desire too, if she hadn’t noticed the weight around her middle, or the warmth against the back of her neck. She froze. It took her a moment to take her surroundings into account, her hangover blurring everything together and muddling her senses into one angry ball of discomfort. 

She was in bed, in a room far too brightly lit, there was a strong arm curled firmly around her stomach, and most alarmingly she appeared to be naked. Oh shit. What had she done?

The night before came back in flashes, like a badly produced movie montage shot out of focus, and one without a lighting department. The alcohol. Her laughter. Jaime smiling. Jaime kissing her.

Jaime-

“Oh _SHIT._ ” This time she actually said it. So she was hungover, and naked in bed with Jaime. Really what had she fucking done?

Her voice was too loud in the silence of their morning and she felt him move behind her. His arm pulled her closer against his chest. Every alarm and warning bell she had went off all at once inside her head. 

_This is not happening,_ she thought. _This is a very twisted nightmare, that’s what it is. Too much whiskey frying my brain is all. I’m about to wake up alone and laugh. This is 100% not actually fucking happening._

She tried to slowly pry herself free from his grip, but it only made him hold her tighter. “Shit shit shitshitshit.” She was so stupid. How could she have done this? 

_Oh my god._

“Stp mv,” a rolling voice grumbled. Oh great. Now he was awake and she felt her body turn to absolute stone. Maybe if she didn’t move he’d fall back asleep and she could slip away and they’d never have to deal with it. “S’early,” he whispered against her skin and it did not make her shiver.

Her stomach flipped and she blamed the hangover nausea.

If he had been anyone else, in any different situation she might have found it endearing and she might have smiled and relaxed into him. She might have enjoyed it. But he was not someone else, he was Jaime, and this wasn’t a different situation, this was the two of them surviving as best they could and barely getting past tolerating each other. 

And if she couldn’t sneak out and feign ignorance, then she’d just have to force herself out of it. But she knew she could not stay where she was. 

“Stop it,” she whispered to him. 

“Hmph.”

“Jaime!” she hissed. 

“God, what?” he groaned, but he loosened his arm enough for her to pull free and turn onto her back to actually look at him. He was a rumpled mess of tangled hair and unfocused eyes and bruised, broken skin. But he was still pretty and damn him for being so pretty right now.

He looked at her for a short moment as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, almost confused. _He probably doesn’t remember,_ she told herself. _God, he probably thought I was Cersei._ It bothered her only slightly more than it should have.

He blinked at her. 

It made her feel so stupid, and she swore to god or the devil or anyone if he made one of his stupid jokes or poked fun at her then, in her truly most vulnerable situation, she didn’t know if she’d hit him again or cry. _Stupid girl._

He propped himself up on an elbow, looked around the room, down at the bed, then back at her.

“Oh shit.”

_My thoughts exactly._

She groaned and pressed her palms into her eye sockets as hard as she could. 

“Well, this is something.” She glared at him. 

“We’re not talking about this.”

“We’re not?” 

“Do you _want_ to talk about it?” He didn’t say anything, but he looked uncomfortable. Why wouldn’t he? She’d, unfortunately, slept with a man that looked half a good even starved and dirty. He’d slept with… her. 

She didn’t even know what she expected him to say anyway. 

“I mean… I…” he stammered out.

“We were drunk and lonely and stupid, Jaime. That’s all. There’s nothing to really talk about.”  
He looked at her like he was thinking it all over very hard in his head. 

“Yeah,” he finally replied as he shook his head and blinked away the internal conflict. “Yeah. No, you’re right.”

“Good. Great. Understood. Never happened, we will not talk about it.”

“Agreed.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” he repeated. “Cool.”

They nodded to each other. The air was thick as fog with how uncomfortable and simply awkward the scene was. They were still naked and they had still slept together. God, she had really slept with him.

Thinking about it only made her head pound and ache more. 

“Ugh, what I wouldn’t give for even the shittiest cup of gas station coffee right now,” she moaned. The marching band only got louder and more aggressive inside her skull. No more alcohol no matter how much he begged her. “Why don’t you look miserable?”

“Ah. I come from a very long line of alcoholics. We know how to handle our liquor.”

“Of course you do,” she grumbled, mostly to herself, then sighed. “Can you leave now?”

“Why?”

“So I can dress myself?”

“Why would that matter, I’ve already seen you naked after all.” It earned him another burning glare, but he didn’t seen to care.

“Do you even remember what you saw?”

A satisfied grin split his face in two, from one ear to the other.

She pushed him so hard he fell off his side of the bed in an angry ball of limbs.

 

They left the houses behind just after midday - once their clothes were collected from around the house and Brienne’s head stopped spinning enough for her to walk - and the road became their home once again. Neither one of them really wanted to stick around the scene of the crime.

They didn’t talk about it.

 

That’s how the next week or so went. They traveled near the road, but not on it, not after their last encounter, checking every sad excuse for a building they come across. They slept inside when they could and on the ground when they couldn’t. And they absolutely did not talk about the drunken roll they had under the sheets, or how it wasn’t terrible, or how the thought of it still lingered in the backs of both their minds like a stray dog that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times you yelled at it.

They shared cans of cold beans and pickles. Jaime had a new, unexplained affinity for peaches. Brienne indulged him.

They took out any of _them_ they come across, Brienne with her knife if they got close enough. Jaime with his gun if he was bored and wanted to play target practice. Luckily, they don’t have any other living visitors.

He made crude jokes.

She would roll her eyes. 

Sometimes she would even laugh.

They got used to each other; they got comfortable.

It was slow and most days it was miserable, but it was what they had and they both knew it would have been worse on their own, even if they still refused to admit it. 

And that’s how it went. 

Then, they found the trailer park.

 

The sun had already begun to set, painting the sky like a bruise, by the time they found it. It made the shadows longer and the windows darker. 

It really was a sad excuse for a park, probably even before it was abandoned. Only six or seven mobile homes, surrounded almost completely by trees, that looked like they were a strong wind away from completely falling apart. They were rotted, molding capsules, the siding peeling away like flesh from bone and the screens of windows blowing in the cold wind like dirty silk. There was trash everywhere. There were dead things in the corners. 

Brienne noticed a single crow watching them as they walked.

Nothing else moved. Nothing else breathed.

“Well, one of these backwoods bumpkins had to have at least one gun. Don’t you reckon?” he said, looking pointedly at a confederate flag hung in one window. He glanced from it to her with a tired expression.

She didn’t like it here and she didn’t like the way the sun was dying and about to bathe them in darkness. But she agreed.

“Let’s take a side and meet in the middle. It can’t take that long,” she said looking around them. 

Jaime took the right side. She took the left. 

She dropped her pack at the edge, not wanting to carry the weight of it in such tight quarters.  
She kept her flashlight. And her gun.

The shadows inside were almost enough to swallow her, with only the solitary beam of light in her hand to see. Molding food decorated the counters and filled the sink. It smelled like overdue trash and decay. She thought she heard a mouse skitter around her feet.

There wasn’t anything to find. 

She left it behind and moved on.

She had to yank the next door open from where it was jammed in its frame. Again, the same smell of rotten food assaulted her nostrils. She shone her miniature spotlight around, illuminating more trash and disarray in its soft glow. It crunched under her boots as she walked. 

More empty cabinets. A children’s drawing was left hanging on the fridge by a red letter J. Two children held hands with smiles painted on their messy, crayon faces. They had flowers in their hands.

A short kitchen knife stood upright in the center of the table by its blade. 

She kicked at a green lump she thought maybe used to be an grapefruit.

The bathroom door was completely gone.The door the the bedroom was marred with long, deep markings. They looked like scratches. Scratches made by hands. She swallowed.

The bed had a dark stain in the middle. 

“Fuck.” 

A crash outside made her jump and spin around. It had sounded like a door slamming. Or something smashing.

“Chill out, Brienne,” she reassured herself. It was a good excuse to leave though.

The sun had set and it was hard to see anything more than a few feet ahead of her even with the keychain flashlight. The wind ruffled her hair and pimpled her skin with goosebumps. She was quiet. She didn’t even want to breathe. 

Something shuffled to her left. 

“Jaime?” she whispered. _Please respond,_ she silently begged.

He didn’t.

Her heart was beating so wildly inside her ribcage she was afraid something would break. Her palms were sweaty despite the chill. Something was off.

She swapper her light out for the gun at her hip.

“Jaime?” 

Silence.

“God dammit.”

She inched forward. 

And then something grabbed her shoulder and yanked her to the side, startling the gun from her hand. It hit the ground and skittered away. A solid body pinned her’s against the side of the nearest trailer. A large, cold hand covered her mouth before she had time to scream.

She jerked and struggled for a few seconds before she stopped to realize it was Jaime standing in front of her, pressing his body against hers to the cold metal at her back. She felt his hot breath against her cheek, just as urgent as hers. Their chests heaved. When she looked into his eyes, they were pleading. 

_Don’t move. Don’t make a sound,_ they said.

She didn’t. 

He removed his hand when she nodded, but he didn’t move his body off hers. 

She could hear it then, over the sounds of their panting and the pounding of blood in her ears. It was the quiet sound of something moving. A lot of somethings, moving together. It was many feet shuffling through dirt. It was the low animal growl, instead of breath. 

Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.

They stood frozen. So still and entangled, they could have been a pair of lovers captured in stone and turned to statues where they stood. 

A shadow passed over his face. 

And she had dropped her gun. 

It was hissing and snarling at them before she could even blink.

Jaime pushed her behind him with enough force to knock her to the ground and threw his arm out to hold it off while he reached for his knife. It dropped at his feet. But there were more to follow. One right after the other rounded the corner as he stumbled back and she scrambled to her feet. 

“The one at the end!” he yelled. “It’s clear, I already checked. Go!”

She ran. He followed.

Half hands and dirty nails grabbed for her, but she tore through them with fists and elbows. She kicked away the one by the door, tripped up the steps and inside, holding it open for Jaime behind her. 

He was farther behind than she’d thought and one caught him in the doorway. It clawed at him as he fought to get free. Yellow teeth snapped, hungry for skin. Dark gore coated the gums.

She put a knife in its mouth and pulled him inside after her. The door slammed shut and she switched the lock closed, sliding down in front of it as a human barricade just in case. 

 

They sat gasping for breath and collecting themselves Jaime sprawled on his ass where she’d thrown him and Brienne with her heavy body propped against the door. 

As his body calmed and his heart slowed, he sat up. And he realized something was wrong.

“Shit.”

In all the chaos, he hadn’t noticed it.

With all the adrenaline pumping him forward and numbing his skin, he hadn’t felt it.

He hadn’t felt the pain in his hand or the warm blood coating his arm.

He hadn’t felt the bite.

 

“Shit,” he had said. 

“What?”

She could only see the shape of him moving in the dark. He was just a dark silhouette against a darker backdrop. 

“Shit,” he said again. It made her nervous. She grabbed for the flashlight on her belt with a new urgency and turned it on him.

The defeated way he looked up at her turned her organs to ice. He looked sad, like all the fight had left him in an instant. His eyes were wet and almost sorry. She felt the dread crawling up the back of her neck.

And then she saw his hand was red.

“No,” she whispered. As if her denial would make it any less true. He looked away from her, shameful.

She moved closer to him. It was just blood. He had just cut himself on his knife. That was all. Maybe it wasn’t even his blood. She thought it even though she already knew it wasn’t the truth. It was too red and fresh to be their blood. It was on his dominant hand, the one he’d held the knife with in the first place.

The deep imprint of teeth and torn away flesh proved it.

“Well fuck,” he said lightly, like it wasn’t his own demise he was staring at on his hand. 

Brienne ran a shaking hand threw her hair and stood up, jerking about frantically. “Shit!” as she hit a cabinet. 

“Dammit!” as she pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes to fend off any angry tears. 

Jaime was bit.

Jaime was dead. 

_They_ were going to take him. 

Like Renly.

She looked around for anything. Tore open cabinets and drawers, and shone her light into them for something. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. It wasn’t like a bottle of peroxide and a bandaid were going to save his life. 

It wasn’t like she’d suddenly find a bottle labeled ‘zombie cure’ sitting happily on a shelf.

But she couldn’t sit and accept it and weep for him. 

Her eyes spotted the meat cleaver on the counter and she paused. She looked from it to Jaime and back. Jaime, who was cursing and kicking his own feet against the wall and maybe crying. And back to the heavy blade. 

She had an idea and she swallowed. It hadn’t worked the last time. But it was all she had, and this time she would be faster. 

She wasn’t losing him today.

She knelt beside him and started unfastening her belt. 

“Oh, one last pity fuck is that it?” he said bitterly. She looped it around his forearm and pulled it as tight as it would go. 

“Brienne…” his voice was soft around her name. “I don’t-”

She picked up the cleaver. “Do you trust me?”

His eyes flitted between hers and the weapon resting in her fist. Back and forth. He swallowed. 

“If I cut it off before it spreads…”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” she said truthfully. She wouldn’t lie to him, she wasn’t. 

There was a pause, where he stared into her eyes and all the air around them froze.

“Do it.”

“Are you-”

“I trust you.” He said the words like he’d never been more sure of anything they’d ever said. “Do it.”

She brought the blade down and he screamed for a long time before he lost consciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters in 24 hours? who am i?


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another long(ish) chapter? who am i?

Jaime woke up wanting to die.

That was his first thought. His second was that he’d never felt pain like this before. It was a fire burning the skin and cracking the bones of his right hand. Right arm. 

He didn’t have a hand there anymore. 

His mouth was dry, his body ached, and part of him wanted to cry not only in pain, but in anger. Anger at his missing gun hand that might as well have been his identity. Anger at the world for fucking him the way it had. Anger at himself for being so fucking stupid. And for a brief moment, anger at Brienne for getting him bitten and saving his life at the cost of part of himself. 

Even though he knew none of it was her fault. It was his.

She must have moved him after the… rather abrupt amputation, because he was reclined on something soft that only vaguely smelled like dust and, so comfortingly, piss. 

“This can’t be sanitary,” he groaned through a throat torn raw by his screams, using his humor like a shield. He wasn’t vulnerable. He was never vulnerable, he couldn’t be even now, down to one hand on the edge of death regretting every choice he’d ever made in his sad life to land himself in this terrible position.

Scratching and hissing drifted like a muffled soundtrack from outside. 

He tried to swallow as much of the pain as he could, and push it down deep within his stomach. He caged the strangled scream behind his teeth and his lips.

When he dared open his eyes, it was still dark, but his vision was soft around the edges. He didn’t have the nerve to look at it yet.

“How to you feel?” Brienne’s voice came from the shadows. She was leaned against the doorframe and she looked guilty, worried, and upset all at the same time. He felt a little bad for being angry at her even if it was only in his own head. She chewed at her plump bottom lip as she looked at him.

He hesitated on the question for a moment, calculating the pain and the aches penetrating his limbs and his organs.

And then he scrambled to the edge of the mattress, aimed for a trashcan, and threw up.

“Fucking terrible,” he said as he wiped the corner of his mouth. She looked away almost embarrassed and he mentally smacked himself again. “How long was I out?”

“Just about an hour I’d say. It was, a lot for you.”

“No shit.” 

_I lost a hand. Obviously it was a lot for me._

_But it’s not her fault, you ass._ He sighed. “Sorry.”

“No, you can be mad. I think you earned that much. Uh, after you passed out I found some moonshine, at least that’s what it smelled like, and tried to disinfect it as best as I could. And the stove was gas so I… I heated the knife and cauterized it.” He could see her discomfort, or disgust, in the way she swallowed and glanced around him. Anywhere, but at the wrist that used to be a hand.

He nodded. It was the best she could do, he guessed. And he should be grateful, she could have put a bullet between his eyes, and sniffled, and moved on. It’s what he would’ve done if it was her. He didn’t think it would’ve been the easiest decision he’d ever made, but he wouldn’t have thought to make a different one. He would’ve dealt with it.

That’s what he told himself at least. 

“And these were stuffed under the mattress.” She lifted her hand and he heard rather than saw the bottle of pills. “They’re not very strong stuff, but-”

“No.”

“What? Jaime, you just-”

“I know what I just did thanks, but you shouldn’t waste them.”

“Waste them? How-”

“If it didn’t work.”

She didn’t say anything, but he could imagine her broad face drawing in at the center like she was in pain. 

“How long? Till we know?”

“Couple hours,” she whispered. “We should know in a couple hours.”

He nodded. A couple of hours. His whole life sitting on a tightrope, swaying back and forth waiting to fall or hang on, unbalanced, for a little while longer.. 

There was a small, broken up part of him shoved to the very back of his mind that wanted it to fail, to have an excuse to give up. Because he’d never give up on his own, not if there was a choice. He was too stubborn to end it himself. But that little jagged sliver wished someone would take the choice from his hands and just fucking be done with all of it. Who was he now anyway?

The bigger part of him wanted desperately not to die. Not just yet. 

He thought about what it would feel like. Feeling himself slip away. Feeling himself become something different. Would he even realize it was happening? Would he fight it? Would he look into Brienne’s eyes as he went? Would he cry?

Every thought flitted in and out of his mind in the singular seconds it took him to process it.

“Tie me up.”

“What?”

“Oh now you have a problem tying me up?” She doesn’t look impressed. “If it didn’t work. I could get violent. Tie me up. To the bed frame. So I don’t… do anything. Please.” 

She did it.

He didn’t ask her to kill him if he was still infected. He already knew she would.

 

 

The next hours he’s sure he’ll remember as the longest of his life. Every second feels like another five pound weight on his chest. It feels like another pair of eyes staring at him, watching him, the way he breathes, every twitch of his muscle to see if he’s a dead man yet.

He tried to push the pain to the very back of him mind and think of anything else, anything, but the fire ran through him like living magma, burning him away. He choked it back again. Force it away from his thought. He ignored it as best. He willed himself to go numb.

He was propped up on musty pillows, his remaining wrist tied through the shotty bed frame. Brienne sat in a questionable chair at the foot of the bed, a gun in her lap. Just in case.

It was a weird feeling, waiting to die. His life didn’t flash before his eyes in a dramatic montage, but he flipped through it like a scrapbook. Snapshots of Tyrion laughing and Cersei smiling down at him and, god forbid, their father played behind his eyes. Followed by his regrets and his mistakes and the nagging worry of who would judge him and how they’d find his life. 

He wasn’t a good man, he knew that, fuck, everyone probably knew that. He had made a lot of mistakes and he had fucked up too many times to count, but he wanted to believe, at least in that moment, that he’d done enough good too. That maybe it had been worth it. 

They stayed quiet for the first hour or so, but then the silence itself was a weight he couldn’t stand. And the constant whisper of noise from outside. And the way her eyes would dart to him and then away. She wasn’t one to conceal her emotions, well at all, and the anxiety was written clearly in her homely features. He couldn’t watch her as she waited for him to die. 

“At Cersei’s wedding, Tyrion and I were forbidden from bringing dates.” She looked at him with her big, scowling face warped by confusion, but he just kept talking, pushed forward by the need to fill the silence with something. “I wouldn’t have even thought about it, but I guess father didn’t want any ‘incidents’. Tyrion, well, they forbade him from a lot of things, but that never really stopped him from doing any of it. He lived to displease.”

He smiled sadly at the thought of his brother.

“So, naturally, he hired an escort and brought her. Our dear sister, god she was furious. I heard things were thrown. But Tyrion, he didn’t give a fuck. I remember watching them all night and thinking, he looks happy.” He shook his head. “He married her. The escort. He ended up falling in love with her that night. That’s how he always told it anyway.”

He swallowed back the bitter taste of grief on his tongue.

“I can tell you loved him.”

“Yeah… yeah the rest of the family, well father and Cersei always hated him. They were terrible to him, because of what he was, how he was born, the mark it left on the golden family name. But, yeah I loved him. He was my brother.”

“My brother drowned when I was 12.”

She wasn’t looking at him when he glanced up. Her face was turned to the small window to her left, but her eyes were somewhere much farther away. 

“How?” he managed.

And she told him. And they talked. 

They talked until her voice sounded warm and his chest hurt less and maybe dying wasn’t the first thought in his head. They filled the little space with their words to keep the evil away as long as they could. Four hours became six became eight and he was still alive and he was still him. He assumed at least.

Brienne finally looked at him for a long moment and let go of her gun.

He was still alive and he didn’t feel mad and he didn’t want to rip the skin from her body. 

He felt like crying again at that moment, the second he realized it worked. He had lost his hand and his right side was still on fire and they were still trapped in a glorified metal coffin and there was still more suffering ahead of him. He might even still die of some brilliantly timed infection in his wrist. But at that moment, he was alive and he was safe and he was surviving despite it all. He could breathe.

_Fuck you, world. Not this time._

“You don’t feel like eating me do you?”

He snatched it up as easily as she’d said it.

“Depends on the context,” somehow he found the energy to smirk around the mangled words.

“Yeah, I think you’re gonna make it.”

Brienne moved to untie him with hands that only barely shook. The slightest tremor in her thick fingers and he felt his own close over them without even thinking about it. Just the smallest touch of skin and bones and muscle as he squeezed her fingertips. _I’m alive. You can breathe, I’m alive._

He didn’t even understand what compelled him to do it, but he had a feeling it was as much for her comfort as it was his own. Just needing to feel someone, anyone, else with him. Just needing the proof, the warmth, the connection.

They’d made it. Right now, they were fine. 

And he released her as quickly as he’d touched her. 

“Well since my death isn’t eminent, I think I’d like to take those pain killers now,” he breathed.

She chuckled at him and he could hear the water in it, the way it balanced right on the edge of emotion. She pinched the bridge of her nose and ran her hand over her face. If it had been a little lighter, he bet he would’ve seen tears in her eyes. 

He didn’t blame her. He felt it too. Too many emotions crashing into his bones like a tidal wave. He just didn’t quite understand why she would be feeling them as he had. Why she would have such a stake in his survival. 

“Yeah,” she said, handing them over.

Once they were swallowed past his throat, he realized just how tired the pain and the waiting had made him. It was something else he had stored in the back of his mind, afraid to fall asleep for fear of not waking up _himself_ again. But now he let himself feel it and it was heavy on his body. He was exhausted from his eyelashes to his toenails and he yearned, deeply, to escape into sleep where the pain couldn’t reach him, at least for a time.

“Go to sleep, Jaime. You need it.” 

“Yes doctor,” he whispered and he could feel the sloppy way it slid to one side with his lips. “You should sleep too.”

“I will.”

Stubborn woman.

“Get in the bed, Brienne.”

“What? I’m fine,” she insisted even as he saw the heavy way her shoulders sagged and her face pulled down at the edges. 

“You’re just as exhausted as I am. You’re about keel over where you’re standing. And don’t tell me you’re gonna sleep in the chair. The bed’s big enough. Get in. I promise I’ll be nice.”

She looked at him for a long time.

“Brienne,” he mumbled with a heavy tongue.

He almost thought she’d continue arguing with him until he actually passed out, but then she gave in with a sigh and started slipping her boots off. 

She fell asleep even before he could, to his satisfaction. He did enjoy being right, especially when it came to her it seemed. 

He let himself look at her for just a second as his eyelids got heavier and the world got fuzzier. Her shape was barely a silhouette turned towards him, a misshapen lump resting atop the bed next to him. This big, honestly aggravating woman, too naive for the world they lived in, too soft for her own good, and too hard for anybody else’s. This creature he’d spent half his time regretting meeting, and the other half annoying with every bit of energy he had.

And he was alive because of her and her nerve and her stupid persistence. 

For once, someone hadn’t given up on him.

“Thank you,” he whispered before he closed his eyes.

 

 

The first thing he saw was her face. 

She had rolled over in the night, and - after he let himself settle into the pain - he opened his eyes and she filled his vision. He wouldn’t exactly say she was prettier in her sleep, or even vaguely more attractive, but there was something in the peacefulness of her that changed her features. Her brow was relaxed and her full lips parted in such a way that made her look almost soft, almost feminine.

It made her look younger and less damaged. Like the world hadn’t beaten her down yet. It was nice.

He let himself just look at her in the silence of the morning, in that one moment. The small scar on her upper lip. The way her short haired curled at her temples and brushed her eyelashes. The dirt on the pinched tip of her nose.

There was something about the stillness of her that made his fingers twitch with an eagerness to touch her. To brush the pads of his fingers lightly across her cheek and feel the warmth of it. 

But he shook it away as just a momentary impulse fueled by his pain (which still squeezed and burned up his right side) or the drugs or literally anything else. 

Instead, he reached his one hand out slowly and flicked the tip of her nose. 

She jolted backwards and her face scrunched in at the center her. When she saw him, her apprehension only cleared slightly and she blinked her wide eyes at him like an owl. 

She wasn’t beautiful. Not the way he, or most people, had come to define it. But her eyes…

He’d never get used seeing the color of those eyes. They were ice and seawater and sapphires, and a blue he’d probably always associate with her for the rest of his damn fucking life. 

“Hello,” he whispered.

“You’re not dead yet,” she said, as if she had expected to wake up next to a corpse. 

“Unfortunately.” 

“And the pain?”

“Well, feels like someone cut my hand off. So, about that ballpark of excruciating I’d say.” It came out more bitter than he meant for it to. But, really, part of him still was bitter. Not at her, just in general. That’s what he had to remind himself.

How could he not be? Losing a hand in general, but specifically the one he had spent years putting all his value into. He couldn’t shoot now, and if he couldn’t shoot...

It was a dark hole hidden between his ribs, that ate away at him the more he thought about it.  
He felt bad when he saw her frown deepen and she moved to sit up on her side of the bed, brushing pale strands away from her eyes.

“Sorry, don’t apologize. You saved my life.” He looked up at her and willed her to believe he meant it and not to trouble herself with it like he knew she would. 

“I put it in danger in the first place,” she reminded him softly. And dammit no.

“Brienne.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“And I’m still alive. So that’s something.” The stubborn woman would blame herself no matter what he said, but he still felt the need to say it. He was struck, only briefly, by how weird it was that he knew that about her. That he knew her now. 

“Can I check it?”

He didn’t want her to. He didn’t want to see it. Seeing it would make it real.

And frankly it probably wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world and he didn’t feel like throwing up just yet.

She must have seen the apprehension, on the verge of becoming fear in his face.

“I have to look at it, Jaime. It could get infected. I tried to clean it, but I mean, look at this place.”

“I know.” He nodded and let her. She helped him sit up so she could unwrap what was now a dark red and brown dish towel tied around his new stump. He hissed as the fabric pulled at the raw, gored flesh.

He managed not to throw up, but fuck he felt like it.

His right arm ended in a red, bloody mess. The skin around it was swollen and pink and puckered up at the end. The end itself, Jaime could only describe as a horrific combination of raw hamburger meat and a cat’s asshole. A really unfortunate cat.

Brienne’s face stayed stoic as she tilted it in front of her face. But the simple fact that she was trying to keep her expression blank told him enough. There was something for her to hide. She was worried. 

“There’s no obvious infection. I don’t think.”

“You don’t think?”

“I don’t know. Do I look like a doctor? You lost your hand pretty traumatically, the swelling and the redness, I mean it _could_ just be that. It doesn’t look bad yet, but that doesn’t mean anything…”

“What does bad look like?” he mumbled. Green and black and skin peeling off of bone?

“How do you feel besides the obvious?”

“Tired. Weak. Kinda lightheaded maybe? A little chilly.”

She sucked her bottom lip between her teeth and worried at it as he spoke. His eyes followed the movement on their own. She was looking at him in that pensive way she sometimes had. 

Then, she reached a steady hand out and rested the back of it against his forehead, the side of his face, his cheek, testing his warmth. 

He was surprised by the comfort it bloomed in his chest. She had such a gentleness for someone so big and so clumsy and so roughened around the edges. 

“You need to eat something. I dropped my bag outside, but you had a couple cans,” she said as she wrapped his horror back up.

“Green beans and oranges.”

He took the green beans, and another pill, and they sat across from each other as they ate. Or as she ate and he tried to force a few soggy pieces down his throat. For her benefit more than his own. 

“You know what’s weird? I can still feel it,” he said around the food in his mouth. “I mean, I know that happens with amputees, but it’s so weird. That it feels like I’m moving it, but it’s not there.”

The pain had began dulling from a scorching fire to a mild ache as the drugs met his bloodstream once again. 

“Wait,” he paused, hand halfway to his mouth, and looked at her rather dazedly. “What did you do with it?”

“Do with what?” 

He held up the offending arm for emphasis and she looked almost embarrassed.

“Oh. Um, it’s in the fridge.”

“The fridge. You put my amputated, infected hand in the fridge?”

The soft blush crept past her collar and up the side of her neck. “Yes?”

Something about the image it gave him was startlingly funny and it pulled a chuckle out of his lungs. His most important body part separated from him and sitting, bloody and dead, on a shelf in a fridge (that didn’t even work) in an abandoned trailer. Well, maybe his second most important body part.

His face as awful pretty too. 

“Of course you did.” He just laughed. It shook his shoulders and he felt it in his stomach, in his chest, in the ache in his smile. In a lazy way. In a soft way.

It drew a smile from her too, a slanted, awkward thing that erased her eyes and pulled her wide mouth even wider across her face. “Shut up. What else was I going to do with it, smart ass?”

“You just threw it in there?”

“Of course not. I wrapped it up first,” she mumbled wryly, and the pain faded just a _little_ more.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm a little unsatisfied with this chapter, but the more i mess with it, the more i screw it up so we're just going for it my guys. it's a little short and slow, but gotta get that build-up i guess. enjoy!

“You know we can’t stay here forever?” 

It had been two days since Jaime lost his hand. Two days of sitting and watching the pain pinch his face, the bruises under his eyes darken, the clammy way his skin reflected the light even though he said he was fine. 

It was two days of smelling the memory of charred human flesh in her nostrils, and decaying human flesh in the broken fridge, and vomit from the side of the bed.

Two days of worrying he was still going to die here, in this cursed trailer, despite everything she’d done. It took tiny bites out of her lungs like a starving rat. He needed an actual doctor, not her sad excuse for ‘medical skills’ she learned from *M*A*S*H* reruns with her father.

“But it’s so homey here?” he grunted from his seat in bed. She didn’t like the staleness in his voice either. She didn’t like any of it.

It was like they were waiting for the axe to drop, all tension and cold bones.

“Jaime,” she huffed, not having the energy or the patience to play along. “It’s worse. We both know it, however much you’d like to hide it or ignore it. You’re feverish. You don’t have an appetite anymore. You’ve thrown up twice. And I know the pain’s still there. We have to… we have to find something or you’re gonna die anyway.”

“That’s cheerful. Well then, let’s just pull right up to the nearest ER.” The shadows cut his face into even more intense, hollow shapes. Sharp cheekbones, heavy eyes, a dark mouth.

“I’m being serious. I did the best I could, but it’s not enough. We need to leave and find some kind of medicine or help.” 

“I think you’re doing a fine job, Nurse Brienne,” he grinned.

She narrowed her eyes in annoyance at the blasé way he threw around his morality when it was slicing away at her. 

_He almost died._

_And I almost lost him._

She shook it away, as she’d been doing to since the cleaver came down. Irritation bled into her voice. “This isn’t another joke Jaime-”

“Okay. I know, I know, but it’s not like you can just drive me to some clinic and get me a script and some bandaids. You’d be lucky to find rubbing alcohol in a gas station. The world’s dead. There’s nowhere to go.” 

“Actually…”

“Of course,” he muttered. 

“I looked at the map, I think we’re about a day, maybe two, from the nearest city-”

“No.” His voice snapped through hers like a mousetrap. 

“What do you mean ‘no’? Just consider it,” she continued desperately. It was the closest shot they had to a miracle, and despite his defiance, she could tell he knew that too. 

A city, a drug store, a _hospital_ … The chance he would have if they found any of that.

The chance he would have if they didn’t.

“No. There’s a reason we’ve avoided the cities, Brienne. There’s a reason we stay off the main roads. They’re filled with hordes. Everywhere. Concentrated populations. Have you forgotten we just barely survived fifteen, maybe eighteen, of them? It’s stupid. It’s a stupid risk.” He paused to look at her and there was something desperate in his eyes. “I’m not gonna put you on the line on a chance.”

That caught her off guard and she momentarily forgot how to open her mouth and move her tongue to make words come out. He didn’t want to risk _her_? She wondered when she would stop being surprised by anything he said. 

“They’d have a hospital. Actual medical supplies not just old moonshine and a dishtowel. Actual medicine. Actual pain meds, Jaime.” 

“And also hundreds of _them_ ready to tear off another limb.”

“Please.”

They glared into each other, battling without words. A war of resolve. Her pushing against him, him pushing back in the heavy air between them testing who would let go first. 

“If I say no, are you going to leave me here and go on your own anyway?” 

“Probably.”

He nodded softly like he knew the answer before he even asked it. “Yeah,” he sighed. “Fine.”

Her upper lip lifted at the corner in a satisfied smirk and he rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, whatever. Now how do you propose we evade the hungry dead people outside that want to eat our faces off?” his head tilted to the side indicating the muffled hissing outside the window.

“There was about 10 of them still out there last time I looked, maybe a few more lurking around. And there’s a latch to the roof in there,” she gestured behind her, to the front room, with her thumb. “In the morning, I can get up there, take out enough to clear a path for you to get into the trees. Get the stragglers attracted to the noise and then follow.”

He didn’t say anything, just tilted his head and narrowed his eyes in a mix of irritation and, maybe, a hint of admiration. It caused her feet to shift uncomfortably beneath her. No one looked at her like that, but him. Even though she was sure there was nothing to admire.

Then finally, after a warm moment under his scrutiny that threatened to pull the blush up her neck, he sighed. “This what you do when I pass out?” It was tired, like a man given up on fighting a battle he knew he couldn’t win.

“Yeah,” she shrugged.

“You know I don’t like it.”

“Obviously, but it’s what we have.” Honestly, she wished they had something better too, but they were a clumsy, tired woman, and a dying, one handed man. 

He nodded. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re an extremely stubborn beast?” 

“You, actually. Several times.”

It made him grin, tired and sallow, but still a grin like a single sunbeam breaking through a storm. Her heart grew wings and tickled the inside of her ribcage.

He was half dead, and half radiant. 

And she was Brienne and therefore it was pointless.

She forced her eyes away and rubbed at the spot between her eyebrows. They were trapped, and exhausted, and about to rather stupidly fight for their way out of one problem and into another. She had other things to worry about outside the way her stomach flipped like a dead fish when he grinned at her.

“Well, now that I’ve accepted your terrible plan, what shall we do until then?” His eyebrows wiggled and every embarrassing thought dancing through her mind was erased and replaced with irritation. 

“Aren’t you dying?” she deadpanned.

“Then shouldn’t you make sure my last hours are _uplifting_?” She ignored the ornery lilt in his voice like a blade dragging through gravel, and the way it tried to coerce dangerous memories out of the dark corners inside her where she’d hidden them. 

Or the way it coated her throat with sandpaper knowing he only meant it in jest. Harmless on his part, she was sure, but still rough. It reminded her how it had taken too much alcohol and too much loneliness for a man like him, golden and beautiful, to touch her. 

She knew she was massive and unfortunate, and all that, she had known it her whole life and she had accepted it and ignored it. It was a stupid thing for her to even waste time feeling bad about. Fuzzy feelings be damned. 

Honestly, she was probably more annoyed at herself for being annoyed in the first place, like she was twelve and gave a shit again. 

_Stupid Jaime and his stupid face and his stupid fucking jokes..._

“You know, when you stay stuff like this, I almost don’t feel bad about chopping your hand off anymore,” she threw back, and pushed the discomfort down until it piled at her feet.

“Do you think the weirdo addict that lived here left any skimpy nurse costumes behind?”

“Do you want to lose the other one?” she turned to walk away, shaking her head in mild amusement.

“Please, Nurse Brienne!” he called after her.

She threw him a middle finger over her shoulder.

 

 

They were ready to leave as the sun rose. 

Jaime still looked like shit, but she told herself it was some combination of blood loss and trauma and pain, and not an infection deep in the tissue of his wrist. It doesn’t quite wipe the frown from her face.

“As soon as it’s clear you go. Straight into the treeline, then bank it back to the road. I’ll follow.”

“You have three minutes, then I come back,” he responded. 

“Jaime.” There wasn’t a point, or a reason, to it when the whole point was that he was weak and missing a hand and he had to get out safely first. But she kept it to herself, and hoped he understood it in her tone.

“I hate every single thing about this plan, just please give me this.” His voice was hard as stone, his eyes were just as solid and there was no moving him from the decision. He was determined, even with the dark shadows under his eyes.

“Fine.”

He nodded back, swallowing as he looked at her, apprehension thickening in the air between them. Seconds dragged through molasses and dripped on her shoes and she told herself it would be completely fine. 

“For the love of god please be careful,” he breathed.

“You too. Run fast.” She tried for a reassuring smile, but missed wide and ended up with more of a soft grimace.

He nodded and she lifted the hatch and pulled herself up through it.

From the roof, she could see six of _them_ ambling in front of the door, and another three lurking between the trailers nearby, dragging their own flesh and organs behind them. She could feel Jaime watching her through the open hatch like a dog pacing around her ankles.

He was the better shot. Or he had been. She was better at combat in close quarters and with a blade. 

But they fell all the same. One after the other, a few shots going wide, making sure she took the time to get it right and not waste more bullets. 

And a path was clear for him.

“Now!”

The door flew open beneath her and she watched him dart awkwardly between bodies toward the trees, ready to cover him if he needed it. He stopped just at the edge to look back at her, something intense in his face.

“Go!” she yelled to him. And he did.

The other three had noticed her now, attracted to the sound. 

She holstered the gun and traded it in for a knife. It felt more comfortable gripped between her fingers. One deep breath and she half climbed, half lept to the ground shuddering as the impact jarred her ankles. 

The two closest to her fell silently, and she was about to turn and follow after Jaime’s lead into the skeletal treeline.

But then she noticed the other gun, abandoned where she’d dropped it in the chaos of that night. And then, a few more feet away, her pack, resting against the wheel of the first trailer she checked days ago. They’re in the opposite direction. And she can already see the shadows of another one of _them_.

Jaime was waiting for her. Three minutes he’d said, but they were already out of food and already worn down. And he wasn’t really dumb enough to turn around and risk coming back for her. He wouldn’t miss for a few extra minutes.

So she mumbled a “fuck it” under her breath and went for it. 

She could feel the ones following behind her. Grabbing the discarded gun she turned and shot. 

Through the eye. Through the forehead. 

Gun in her belt, then after the pack. Her legs propelled her forward and she could taste her heart in her throat. She’d grab it and go and Jaime wouldn’t worry.

Her hand closed around the strap and something else’s closed around her wrist.

It came around the corner hissing and clawing, desperate for a taste of her. Milk white eyes buried in swollen sockets. The left side of its face was gone, exposing yellow teeth and shiny muscle. Something black bubbled where its lips should have been. 

She reared back, but instead of breaking free, she only succeeded in pulling it backwards on top of her as her spine connected with the ground. 

Her left hand gripped at the throat. Her fingers sunk into dead flesh and met the bone underneath. Her right hand shoved the knife through its chin and into its brain. 

Dark blood spilled and sputtered down her arm and across her chest, coating her in gore. She pushed the dead weight off her, rubbed her clean sleeve across her mouth, grabbed the back, and turned before any more surprises could materialize in the shadows. 

She wasn’t even halfway to the road when Jaime stopped short in front of her. 

“Sweet fuck!”

“What are you doing?” 

“I said three fucking minutes didn’t I? What the fuck happened? I heard the shots, the later ones. Are you okay?” It all tumbled out of him breathless and wild.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re covered in blood, Brienne.”

“It’s not mine,” she insisted, looking down at the carnage she wore. She didn’t know how many more were nearby, especially with the number of them in the park alone, and she wanted to put them far behind her. “I’m fine. I went back for my pack-”

“You what? Fucking hell, you went back for a _pack_?” His expression was incredulous.

“AND the gun,” she finished with and edge. She wasn’t fond of being talked to like a child, especially from someone with a mentality she considered barely above that of an eight year old. “There’s food in it and we’re out. It was worth it.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and threw his head back in frustration, muttering something under his breath that sounded like “worth it my ass”.

“I was worried,” he huffed when he managed to calm his breath and look at her again.

“I’m sure,” she breathed with a teasing smile. When his expression didn’t soften she sighed. “But I am okay.”

He looked her up and down apprehensively, eyes cataloguing every blood stained inch of her exposed skin in a few seconds, like he didn’t quite believe her. 

Apparently satisfied, he rolled his eyes with a huff. “Fine.” 

She didn’t miss the slight way he swayed, or the sweat collecting at his temples. He must have been running back when she ran into him and now he looked more exhausted and wearier than he had just minutes ago. She wasn’t the one to be worrying about.

“Let’s just move so I can get this shit off me.” 

_And get you closer to help._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more braime meltdowns can be found @trashy-lannister on tungle dot com


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and another one up. don't know how i feel, but i hope you enjoy it. 
> 
> comments make me happy and sometimes they make me cry, even though i'm horrible at ever responding. i see them and i love them and i thank you <3

They probably walked half a mile before he forced her to stop. Both for her sake as well as his own, his legs already weakening. Her face was still flushed and stained pink along her jaw.

He hated the color on her.

“We’re far enough, just stop a second.” When she looked around wearily he continued. “We’re fine. _They_ wouldn’t have followed us this far. Or this fast. Just get yourself cleaned up. You’re starting to smell anyway.” He winked for good measure. 

She rolled her eyes, but turned to drop her pack, and he settled against the side of a tree to catch his breath. She slid the flannel off her shoulders; it was too far gone, soaked through with dark brown blood on the one side. _Pity,_ he thought. _It was a nice color._

She traded in her thermal undershirt and as the fabric pulled from her body he absolutely did not follow the dip of her back, or the slight curve of her waist, or the expanse of freckles painting every inch of her exposed body. He definitely did not think about the memory of how warm and soft her skin had felt the night his fingers dug into it. He one hundred percent did not consider the way the flat muscles of her stomach had shivered under his mouth.

He didn’t.

He shifted his hips uncomfortably and looked away while she finished cleaning herself. They were dangerous things to think on. He swept them from his mind and locked them back in the rusted cage where they belonged. 

They wouldn’t talk about it, and he wouldn’t think about it.

 _Too long away from Cersei,_ he told himself. 

“Do you want to rest any longer?”

He swung his gaze back and she was dressed. Her skin was clean of blood, with only an angry red splotch left behind where she’d scrubbed the stain away from her skin. Her pale hair was raked back from her face again, a few strands dyed a pale pink.

His body begged him to take the offer with the way his muscles clenched and his head ached, but he shook his head.

“No, let’s go. The sooner we move, the sooner we can get there and get the fuck out.”

 

 

It turned out they didn’t make it as far as he had hoped. 

Two, maybe pushing three, hours later they had to stop for him to catch his breath. There was a pounding in his head like a pulsing shadow behind his eyes that dug into his brain. The world shifted every few steps. His missing hand felt like he stuck it straight into an open fire and let it burn. He squeezed his eyes shut and fought the urge to scream and spit ashes from his lips.

His body felt so fired and so broken.

When Brienne looked at him from the side he could tell she was worried, he could smell the anxiety rolling off her. 

He let her check the bandage again, offering her his wounded, bloody wrist like a mangled lion’s paw. Her mouth large pinch inward and her eyebrows pull themselves down over her eyes as she inspected it. He could hear her swallow. He knew none of it was good.

“I have to do something, and I really don’t think you’re going to like it,” she said wearily, watching his reaction.

“Do I ever?” he sighed. “What?”

“I snagged what was left of the moonshine from the trailer...” She pulled it from the pack. 

“Just do it.”

It was one of the the worst pains he could ever remember feeling, nearing the original injury itself. Then, he at least had the adrenaline to cushion the edges of it. This time it almost burned him away. His skin felt like it was blistering and falling apart, being ripped open and torn away from his bones. Needles pinched and pulled the veins of his arm. It roared to life, and then slowly receded and he tasted blood in his mouth.

He wished for a moment he’d have just died the first time. Instead of slowly rotting away.

She offered him the water, and held it to his mouth like a fucking child when his hand shook too much to grasp it himself. 

Another three hours and Brienne decided they should stop after a few too many glances in his direction. 

 

 

The next day went much like first, tired and long and aching.

They made it five hours before he let her stop the first time, if only because he refused to rest until his legs felt boneless beneath him. His fingers trembled like the naked tree branches in the wind. 

He hurt. 

 

 

He could tell she was walking slower than normal so he could keep pace and wouldn’t fall behind. Bitterness tickled the back of his throat. It made him feel like a child. Jaime Lannister had never felt smaller. He had never felt more incapable or more helpless in his own life. 

She was only a few steps ahead of him, skirting the side of the road with her eyes on the tree line. His feet felt like they were walking through mud, grabbing and dragging at his heavy ankles, instead of shuffling across the flat black expanse of highway that was actually before him. 

He wished he could lay down and let sleep take him gently in her arms and wrap him in darkness forever, where there was no more pain and there was no more exhaustion and where he was warm. In his mind, he imagined her embrace was strangely strong, and soft, and freckled by constellations.

He caught Brienne’s gaze flicking to the side to check on him out of her peripheral again. If he was in better sport he’d poke fun at her for it, regurgitate another lame joke to watch her blush. But he wasn’t in better sport. 

A growling startled both of them from their right. Two silhouettes turned from shadows into shapes into decaying creatures limping up towards them. 

It was a delayed reaction as his right hand went to his hip and he tasted poison at the realization of his missing limb. Of course he didn’t have fingers or a palm to hold the weapon with if it had even been there. Of course the pain had stolen it away. 

He moved his left hand to where Brienne had moved the holster when she humored him enough to hand over a gun in the first place. 

He felt the weakness in the softened, unsure way it lifted before him.

He missed both shots.

They continued forward: one at her, one at him. He missed another shot from mere feet away and if he’d had the time he probably would have let frustrated tears fall. 

He could see the cloudy yellow color of its eyes, shot through with threads of red. Sick blue skin. A throat torn away. A black dress that looked like it used to be pink.

Brienne shot it before he could aim his gun a pointless fourth time.

He heard her asking him if he was okay, but he didn’t listen. All he could think about was the feeling creeping up the back of his neck like cool breath on his skin. The hopeless, dark feeling of being useless and broken. 

 

 

“Carrots or beans?” She could tell her voice was heavy with the way she tried to keep it light. He looked at the cans she held, then to her slowly. So tired and so far from the presence he once held, the golden statue of a man was nowhere before her. He wasn’t even marble. He was barely blank and broken stone.

“I’m not hungry,” he mumbled. 

“Jaime, you have to eat something,” she insisted.

“I don’t want to.” He didn’t look up at her from where his dead eyes rested on his feet. _He could be a corpse,_ she thought, looking at him. The sunken way his skin hugged his face. The dark circles that bruised his eyes. _He could be dead._

She swallowed her impatience and replace it with fear. 

“Please eat.”

 _I didn’t cut off your hand for you to give up._ She wanted to scream it. She wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him. _I didn’t drag your aggravating ass around a forest for weeks for you to starve yourself. I didn’t get used to you, just to lose you now._

He finally looked at her and away again and she wanted to shiver. His eyes were so blank, so devoid of anything resembling a feeling it startled her. It was wrong, for eyes like his, eyes that used to be so bright and so sharp with humor, to now be so dead. 

“Why bother? Why not save the food and end it now? Why drag it out?”

She can feel the fear melting into anger and boiling in her belly. Her expression turned hard.

“What’s the point?” he insisted. “I’ve lost my hand. I can’t shoot a gun. I can’t survive. I’m pathetic.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“I was that hand. Everything useful about me was that hand. So what am I now without it? I can’t protect myself anymore. You saw that. Why should I fight so hard for something so pointless?”

And then she’d had enough of it. The bitter pity that was strangling him. The stupid whining over a limb after everything he’d survived. How could he just sit and die after all of it? She couldn’t stomach another second of it.

She stomped forward, massive feet slamming into the earth until she was bent next to him and could take his face between her hands. She forced him to look at her.

“God dammit, Jaime Lannister. You’re not just a hand. You get that? The world ended, it took everything from everyone it could gets its hands on and its teeth into. People have lost more than hands, people are dead and dying, and you want to give up because you’re not a perfect shot anymore? Because you’re hurting?” She pushed every word from her mouth into his chest with as much force as she could and she stared into his eyes like she was a fire.

“Look at me. Fuck the hand. Learn to use the other one. Fuck the world. It doesn’t owe you anything. So, you’re going to fucking eat something and stop acting like a coward and feeling sorry for yourself and you are not going to give up. You aren’t the type.”

He just blinked at her with an expression, for once, she couldn’t puzzle out. She could feel his jaw working under her skin. 

“You’ve barely known me a month, how can you tell what type I am?” he spit.

He was right, but for some reason the words birthed a tight coil of hurt inside her. Was that really how he thought? It wasn’t a long time, that much was true, but it was so much. 

She had put an importance on his spot in her life by then. She had survived with him and grown comfortable with him and she cared about him. And hearing it dismissed, even though he made a point, it chipped at her ever so slightly.

She released his face and he slipped away from her like water through her fingers, but she only hardened herself more. He could think what he wanted, she wasn’t going to let him sit there and die.

“Fine, then do it for Cersei.”

His neck snapped at her name. "What?"

“You’ve known her for ‘more than a month’. You… love her. So do it for her. Live so you can get back to her.”

She finished and he looked at her with an open mouth as she turned away and stomped back to eat her carrots. If he was going to be difficult then he could have the fucking beans.

She knew he was hurting. She knew he was suffering, maybe dying even, because she cut away his identity to save his life, but she’d be damned if he wanted to let it be for nothing and just accept it and fade away. She’d be damned.

“Sorry,” he whispered after several tense minutes. 

“I cut off your hand,” she sighed. “You’re allowed to be mad, I suppose. And you’re right. You’ve only known me a month. You’re life it’s something I can ask of you.” 

The last sentence came out quiet and almost sad. It hurt her throat to say it.

“That’s not true.” 

They looked at each other and there was something different in his eyes, something raw and a little sharp on the edges. It was hard and confusing and the strength of it made her turn her face away. 

“Cersei’s probably dead already.”

“You don’t know that-” she tried to reassure him, but he cut her off.

“Not definitely no, but in all likelihood… it’s something I should admit to myself. I probably won’t find her. She’s gone. That’s something I should be ready for.” 

She thought about it for the first time, what would happen after they got where they were going. Would she leave him behind? Would he leave her? 

She admitted to herself, in the safety of her own thoughts, that maybe she didn’t want to. And maybe that scared her.

“What will you do? If you don’t find her south, I mean?”

“I haven’t thought that far yet.” Somehow, it sounded like a lie.

He ate the beans. Or he tried to anyway. 

Brienne watched him fall asleep across the fire after only a few bites, leaving the half full can at his side. 

He didn’t sleep restfully, twitching and mumbling all through the night.

 

 

When they camped the third night, she could tell he was feverish. His eyes took a moment too long to focus. His skin was too warm when she brushed against him, the wound too red and shiny when she pulled the bandage off. Infection.

She didn’t tell him, didn’t say a word. He probably already felt it inside himself anyway.

When he started to flinch in his sleep, she pulled his head to rest in her lap. Her fingers ran through his greasy hair, smooth against his scalp. The heat rolled off of him even as his body shivered against her. 

She was losing him after all.

He called out for Cersei. More than once, his weak voice desperately cracking against her name, until the words no longer had a form and were lost to whimpers. But she held him.  
It was all she could do not to cry.

“I’m so sorry, Jaime,” she whispered.

He couldn’t hear her. 

 

 

She was startled by a sharp pain in her side and opened her eyes to find a gun in her face. 

“Get up.”

She sat up slowly, her hands open and raised in front of her. She begged them not to shake.

There were three of them, surrounding her in a circle. One held the gun at her head, with thin hands. His eyes were dark and glittered like a starved rat. 

Another stood off to the side, almost behind her. He was bigger, hairier. His thick arms and face covered in dark curls.

The third one had Jaime. He was on his knees across from her, hands bound, with the man’s fist tangled in the back collar of his shirt. His own eyes were bleary and barely focused, but they watched her. With his mouth in a hard line, he watched her.

“And what do we have here?” the one with the gun sneered. It made her feel ill. “What are you doing camped outside the city?”

She perked at that. The city? Maybe they had made it farther than she thought.

“We are here looking for help, for my friend. He needs medical attention, or just medicine.”

“Did you plan to steal it from us?” the one behind Jaime growls.

“No. I swear. We just need help. Please.”

“Aye, the ole guy doesn’t look too good does he boss?” he chuckled, yanking at Jaime’s collar and jostling his shoulders. He swayed.

She thought about her options. She didn’t sleep with any of her weapons on her, and they had already separated her from the ones she had left beside her in the night. All except for the small blade strapped into her boot at the ankle. But with the barrel of a gun poised in the air, inches from her forehead, she doubted she could pull it free before he fired a shot and sprayed her brains across the dirt.

“How’d he lose the hand? Chop it off himself rather than touch you with it?” They all roared with laughter. She saw the slightest shake of Jaime’s head. He still looked at her. Through the fog of his fever she could see him willing her to be smart, and be safe.

She looked away to glare at the one closest to her, on the other end of the gun. 

“My, you are a hideous fuckin’ thing aren’t ye?” He lowered the gun just a fraction as he laughed, from her forehead to her chest. So she could see him leer. “But I guess you’ve still got a warm-”

She spit at him before he could finish the sentence. 

And the next thing she knew his hand was fisted in her hair yanking her head back painfully. Jaime struggled foreword, pulling against the man holding him. He was bristled like an angry dog ready to bite. 

“Stop.” His voice was weak.

It only made the men boom louder. The gun pressed roughly into her cheek.

“He seems pretty fond of the beast, now doesn’t he?” his breath was hot and vile when it touched her skin. It smelled rotten, like vomit and decay. “You feel the same way, sweetheart? Let’s see.”

The gun moved from her cheek and pointed at Jaime. And that was all it took. 

They hadn’t tied her hands yet, so she threw an elbow back into his nose and heard the crunch of broken bones. He let go of her hair. As she pitched forward she reached for her ankle, for the knife there. If she could free it and turn in time to jam it into his eye socket…

But then pain exploded at the back of her skull like a firework set off too close. She saw every color that existed at once dance behind her eyes as she tried to blink them away. It grew dark. And then there were no colors at all and everything felt black. As she fell forward she thought she could hear someone yelling her name. 

 

 

Jaime remembered it in flashes. It came to him in foggy still life shots, hazy little moments.  
Brienne fell and he yelled her name and struggled as hard as his dying body would let him to get away and to get to where she had crumpled. And then he fell too.

 

He felt like he was moving, but everything was dark and too loud and he couldn’t think. Voices like bees spun around his head and he wanted to throw up and he wanted to scream. 

 

There were faces hovering over him, next, but it was like seeing them through dirty glass. They were only shapes and muffled sounds and for a second he thought maybe he was underwater and he tried to move, but he couldn’t. A weight pushed on him and he couldn’t breathe or talk or stand. 

_Maybe I’m in the ocean and I’ll just float away._

 

He called for Brienne. He had to find her. He had to make sure they didn’t hurt her. He couldn’t let them hurt her. 

 

He thought he saw Cersei, standing in a beautiful, golden light reaching for him, but when he blinked she was gone and he was alone.

 

He threw up on himself. And he cried.

 

He didn’t know where Brienne was. Shouldn’t she be here? She wouldn’t leave him. But everything was dark and he couldn’t see her and his skin felt too cold and too hot at the same time. There was something wrong, but he didn’t know what it was and he was very confused. And he wanted Brienne to come to him because she was gentle and comforting, but she didn’t.

He tried to look around, but he couldn’t see her.

When he tried to call for her, his voice didn’t work.

He didn’t know where she was and he was scared.

 

And after that, there was only the pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next chapter is gonna be... a lot.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> honestly, for whatever reason this chapter gave me HELLA trouble and i'm not completely happy with it, but the more i try to mess with it the more i hate it so you know what, it's fine and i'm just going to post it and hate myself in silence. 
> 
> still hope you can enjoy it though, there are some moments

Everything was white. 

Not the sharp, clean white that picked at your eyes and made you dizzy. It was the dirty, off-white of broken egg shells and milky cataracts blinding dead eyes. 

She immediately felt trapped like a caged animal. 

Her anxiety cut through the pounding ache at the base of her skull as she looked around the room. Dirty white walls. Stale cream tiles. A heavy metal door. There were no windows. The bed creaked and wheezed as she pushed herself to the edge. It was bolted to the floor.

She smelled bleach - barely masking vomit - so strong it made her nose run. 

Somehow, a light flickered above her head.

She was alone. Jaime was not there with her.

Her hands shook. She pinched the bridge of her nose until the room stopped spinning and she could make herself breathe again. Fear was locked in the cage of her ribs, the key buried in her stomach, and bravery slid over her body like armor. 

She didn’t think on the idea he might be dead. She didn’t let herself.

 

 

Several hours, or what she could assume were hours considering she had no way of knowing for sure, and nothing happened. There was no noise, but her breathing. There was no movement, but her own shadow and her aching muscles. 

She slammed her palm against the door. Of course the knob stuck when she tried it open. She yelled for someone, someone to let her out, someone to show themselves, someone to face her.

Someone to bring her Jaime. 

Still there was silence. 

She sat on the bed and counted the cracks in the ceiling. There were 37. 

She ignored the straps attached to each side of the rickety bed frame. They were white too.

She wanted to hit something.

A small door opened at the base of the door and she jumped. A tray slid through the opening, skidding across the tile. Bread that was green on one side. An apple that was more brown than red. A chunk of something pink and wet she assumed was supposed to be meat. 

She didn’t eat it. 

They were out there. Whoever had taken her - taken them - and left her in the room with the door locked between them. Whoever had Jaime. 

She picked up the tray and threw it against the wall and yelled into the door. 

 

 

She tore the mattress open. Just in the corner, on the bottom. She picked and pulled at the thin padding until her large fingers broke through the surface. Then, she pulled the spring out. 

She didn’t have an exact plan, but it was better than nothing. And it gave her something to focus on aside from her captivity and her solidarity.

 

 

The door opened. She heard the click of the lock and watched the turn of the knob and pulled herself to her feet in seconds. The bent spring tucked away from sight. 

A dirty man stepped into the room. He was smaller than her, in height and weight. He had a thin face, with skin that didn’t seem to fit over his bones in the right way. His eyes were small and dark. 

Before he could speak she threw her heavy body into his, slamming them both against the cinder block walls enough to hear his skull echo off it. The spring, the pathetic little spiral of cold metal, pressed against his neck where she knew blood pumped. 

“Where’s Jaime? Where am I?” she growled.

He giggled. _Giggled_. Baring broken yellow teeth and swollen gums. 

She pressed her weapon harder against his paper skin. She had the strength to shove it clear through and watch him choke on the blood. If she needed to.

“Where the fuck is my friend? What do you want?”

His head fell back and he laughed, loud and wet and sounding like a gargled choke with his rotting mouth open wide. 

She saw he didn’t have a tongue. 

She was so struck by her own shock, her body was late to react to the door opening again to her left. She turned half a second too late and she felt every muscle in her body go rigid. Cold pain spun itself around her muscles until she shook. She managed to throw her fist out and maybe she heard a crunch before she fell in a heap and was covered in fog.

When she came back to herself and it hurt less to exist, she noticed her hand was cuffed to the bed frame. She yanked and pulled and tore at the metal that encircled her wrist until her fingers felt cold and her skin was red and raw. 

And when she still wasn’t free, she let herself cry.

 

 

Someone else tried to come in. A sweaty man with pink skin and no hair. His eyes were as red as his cheeks. He only wore a dirty grey shirt and matching stained pants. His arms were torn and patterned with scars. 

She spit and kicked and raged until he left her again. 

Her wrist hurt. 

 

 

She was trying desperately to jam the end of her second weaponized spring, after they’d taken her first one, into the keyhole of the cuffs when the door opened again. Slower this time, and she readied herself to launch her body forward against the restraint, despite the ache gripping her fingers.

A small, wrinkled man shoved himself through the entrance. He looked rather weak and tired despite the dangerous way his eyes glittered. He entered and held the door open behind him for another shadow and Brienne felt claws dig themselves into her lungs in apprehension.

Someone else rushed through and she had to blink, had to remember how to breathe and how to stand without crumpling and how to keep her hand steady at her side. 

“Jaime?”

His eyes were clear again, or clearer than they had been, free of the fever that clouded them. His skin looked like skin and not a pale wrapping keeping his skeleton from scattering. He looked alive and he was alive and he was there. She wanted to touch him just to be sure. She ached to.

But she didn’t. 

Her own relief was reflected in his expression as he looked at her, a rush of breath escaping him as he sighed. But it faded the moment he took in her whole form and noticed the cuff trapping her in place.

“Uncuff her. Now.”

The wrinkled man shuffled forward and clumsily unlocked her. She rubbed at the sore bones. He looked once more at Jaime before leaving and shutting the door behind him. She didn’t hear the lock click.

She rushed forward and wanted to hug him before she thought better of it and hesitated. 

She looked at him. He looked back at her. They didn’t move.

“You okay?” he asked. His voice was gentle. 

“Yeah. You?” she nodded her head at his wrist, covered in clean wrapping and gauze, held gingerly against his chest.

“Better.”

So they had helped him. They had held a gun before their faces, and knocked her out and locked her in a room, and then they had saved Jaime’s life. 

Her head hurt.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“They wouldn’t let me out, Jaime. They wouldn’t say anything, if you were okay, where we were. I’ve been locked in here since I woke up. I don’t even know how long it’s been. I don’t-” She could feel the tension climbing in her voice, the raw fear and confusion gripping her throat. 

“Hey, I know.” He stepped closer. He was so close. She could feel the way his breathing stirred the thin strands of hair at her temples. 

“I don’t trust them,” she whispered.

He looked at her hard, something troubled and bare hidden in his eyes. “I don’t either.”

She thought of the straps on the bed, and the almost white walls, and the plastic tray, and the man without a tongue.

“I think it’s a psych hospital.” He blinked. “I think… we might be in Harrenhall.”

His eyebrows climbed towards his hairline. Harrenhall. It wasn’t just a psych ward. It was an asylum and one famous for taking high risk patients and those unstable enough to be dangerous. It had been in the news enough times for both of them to recognize the name and fit the pieces together. “Fuck,” he muttered.

“That’s not all. I think… Jaime, I think these people might have been patients here.”

She heard his swallow. 

“I hate to say I told you so…”

“If we hadn’t come you’d be dead.”

“I am well aware of that, actually. I’m just not sure this is much better.” He sounded as tired as she felt. 

“They saved you.” It wasn’t even a whisper. 

“I know,” his voice softened, as did his eyes. “But why?”

She shook her head. That was the question wasn’t it. He was alive and with her still, because of these people. Whoever they were. However dangerous they were. Why would they take them, threaten them, just to save him? It made her feel small.

The door opened again behind Jaime, and the timing had her sure they were listening, or trying to. He spun around to stand beside her. If the circumstances had been different, she might have taken a moment to appreciate the fact that he knew better than to put himself in front of her like she needed the protection to begin with. But he was with her all the same. 

Instead, she watched the man walk in and recognized him as the one that had held Jaime by the collar at camp. With the thin face, dark greasy hair, sharp beard. She bristled at the sight of him. 

“Hello,” he sneered. “Follow me.”

 

 

He led them through dim halls lined with doors on either side. Some of them were shut, others left open, and some completely missing. It smelled like piss. Laughter and whispers followed them like ghosts. Ghosts in the walls and under their feet.

Jaime stayed directly at her side the entire way. She could feel the tension he held in his body. It was reflected in hers.

The greasy man didn’t speak other than to point out a bathroom and, for some reason, a storage closet and to inform them his name was Locke. Every time he looked over his shoulder at them, he leered. 

Every step felt more dangerous, and more haunted. Every step she wanted more and more to run, or explode, or something.

They got to a cafeteria, or what used to be a cafeteria. A few other dirty men loitered in the corners. She could feel their eyes like spiders down her neck.

He confirmed they were in Harrenhall, and even though she had already known, the news sent a strange shiver through her body. 

He offered them food that wasn’t already rotted and when they didn’t eat he let them know if he was going to kill them they wouldn’t have even been brought to Harrenhall in the first place. It must have made enough sense to Jaime, because he began to scarf down the brown broth before him. He gave her a sideways glance when she didn’t follow his lead. 

All she could focus on was her eyes flitting from man to man in the corners, listening to the whisper that floated by her ears. She watched Locke across from her with distrust. The walls felt too small. Everything felt out of place and it all told her to leave. It filled her lungs instead of air and she thought she might drown. She eyed a fork and her fingers twitched.

Jaime’s hand found hers under the table. His long fingers threaded themselves through hers. His warm palm pressed against her own where it rested in her lap. And it was a comfort that spread from her hand, up her arm, and through her chest. His touch anchored her then, pulled her back to where she really was. 

He didn’t look at her as he did it, just gave her the lightest squeeze. She noticed he’d already finished his food and took the hint. She sniffed hers and took a tentative swallow. It didn’t have a flavor really, but it was warm and the moment it hit her stomach she craved more.

“Why are we here?” Jaime asked.

“We saved your life. Aren’t you grateful? It’s what your lady here asked for, isn’t it?” Brienne imagined worms wiggling between his teeth.

“Thanks. It’s greatly appreciated. When can we leave?”

“Ah,” she didn’t like the way he said it. Or the way his eyes lit like a fire. “Not so fast. We did our part. I think we deserve a little payment in return.”

Her heart beat faster. _Get out. Run. Go far away from this place,_ it sang.

Jaime squeezed her hand. 

“Like what?” she didn’t miss the dangerous tone he used to thread the words together.

Locke looked between her eyes and his. The smirk never left his face. She couldn’t shake the creeping crawling feeling he was looking through her, into her. 

“Your help,” he finally said. To Jaime.

“Excuse me?”

“We helped you, now you help us. A trade.”

“How?”

“We need supplies, from a shop a few blocks down.”

“And you need us because?”

“Clearly most of the people here would be no help.” So some of them were patients after all. “We need another competent… hand to help us out. You go with three others, watch their backs. And not _us_ ,” his gaze pinned on Jaime. “ _You,_ ” he said it like he’d been waiting the entire conversation to share that part of his plan.

Brienne started. Just Jaime? The idea of it stunk. It wasn’t right. It felt off.

His thumb rubbed soft circles along the back of her hand, easing the panic and the fire. _Calm down. Let me handle it. It’s alright._

“Me? Why not both of us? I have one hand, my non-dominant one as a matter of fact, in case you were unaware. She’s the stronger one.”

“Oh of that, I am deeply aware. She’s also the one that threatened several of my men, broke one’s nose, and tried to kill another. They wouldn’t trust her enough to bring her along.”

“But they’d trust her enough to leave her here?”

“If the door says locked.”

She wanted to protest. Honestly, she wanted to drop Jaime’s hand and throw herself across the table at Locke herself. They meant to lock her back in that awful tiny room and take Jaime far off on his own. Away from her. Again.

"You expect me to leave her?"

"Momentarily."

She hated it, but she kept quiet. Jaime was the better talker amongst the two of them. And he needed her to trust him. So she would.

“I do it and we go?”

“You do it, you can take a share and you’re free to leave.”

Jaime watched Locke. Locke watched Jaime. 

“She stays in the room, and you don’t fucking touch her. No one bothers her, no one looks at her. No one thinks about her. I get back and we’re gone.” He left no room for negotiation, so room to reconsider or misunderstand his words. 

Locke moved his dark eyes over her, her plain face and her wide shoulders and her scowl, and scoffed out a gruff laugh. Like the thought of it was a joke in and of itself. “No one’s touching her.”

Jaime was silent for a moment, calculating the man before him. She desperately wanted to ask him not to take it. Not to go. She didn’t trust these men, she didn’t trust anything about any of it. 

“Fine.” 

Locke grinned. “Good. Then, you’ll go tomorrow.”

“No. As soon as possible.” His voice was hard.

“In a couple hours, then.”

Brienne swallowed the hard ball of anxiety in her throat.

 

 

“I hate it.”

“I know you do, but it’s our easiest way out of here. We can’t fight them. Unarmed, one-handed, and outnumbered. Odds aren’t really in our favor.”

He sat beside her on the bed, his arm pressed against hers, their backs resting against the wall. He had followed her back after the terrible conversation with Locke, to wait with her while they prepared to leave.

Her anxiety had been building and growing like a black hole hidden behind her organs since they left that hall. She wanted to cuff him to the bed herself, and force him not to go, and to find another way because the whole thing reeked of suspicion. 

“I still hate it,” she mumbled. “I don’t trust them.”

“I don’t either, but that just means I’ll watch them closer. I’ll pay attention. I’ll be ready.” 

She wanted to believe him. She truly did. 

“If you don’t come back, I’m gonna break out on my own and kick your ass.”

“I believe you,” he chuckled. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and find another bottle of whiskey.”

“Hell no. You can leave that behind, thanks.” Just the mention of it made her shiver and her stomach bubble. And not completely because of the hangover afterwards.

“Why? I think we had enough fun with it last time?” He smiled at her in that ornery way she had missed when he was almost dying. Her stomach did a small cartwheel.

“Jaime,” she warned. 

“Oh, right. We’re not talking about it,” he quipped. He schooled his face into a serious expression that just made him sound more sarcastic and nodded.

“Yep.”

“Didn’t happen.”

She turned to give him a bored glance, but he was already looking at her with a soft, teasing smile and it made her pause. It looked nice on his face.

He was such a shit.

“Shut up, Jaime.” 

He only smiled more and bumped her shoulder with his. She rolled her eyes. “I changed my mind. They can keep you.”

“Ah, you’d miss me too much.”

“I guarantee you I would not.” It was a lie. 

“You wound me, Brienne.” She just shook her head at his ridiculous voice, and his ridiculous face, and the ridiculous way she really wanted to smile and laugh and move closer to him before he left. It got quiet again, the kind of quiet where words floated just beneath the surface, but no one ever said them. 

“Actually-” he started. 

The door opened, cutting him off, and Locke’s greasy face stepped through. “We’re leaving.”

She looked to Jaime as he swallowed and nodded. They both stood. He was going. 

He turned to her at the door and she knew her fear and apprehension was painted clear on her face. 

“I’m coming back.” She nodded. She didn’t trust herself to open her mouth then. So he stepped closer, into her space until they shared breath. She really didn’t want to look at him. “Brienne.” 

His face was true and open when he grabbed her hand gently with his fingers. 

She admitted to herself then that she was scared. Only this time it was no longer just the fear of being left alone again in the world. This time it was the fear of being without him. 

She wouldn’t trust him on his own, she sure as hell didn’t trust him with them. What if she never saw that face again? What if he never teased her or pulled the blush to her cheeks or laughed at her. 

She wanted to ask him not to go one more time, even if she knew he needed to. She squeezed his palm.

“I’ll get the stuff and then we’ll leave. Look at me. I’m not gonna leave you here. I promise.” 

She nodded.

“I promise.”

“Okay. Be careful. Don’t trust them.”

“You don’t either,” he whispered. Then, he looked at her for a long time. He didn’t want to go either. Had they grown so reliant and fond of each other the simple parting pulled at both their chests? His eyes almost looked wet.

"I'm coming back," he sighed and pulled her forward to press a kiss to her hair, so soft she barely felt it. And then he turned and left and she stared at the closed door he’d left behind.

She had a terrible fucking feeling.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's a month late, but i finally got my shit together and recovered from my GRIEF. it's a long one! i hope the wait is worth it. enjoy! <3

He didn’t want to go. 

It felt like a bad idea. It felt wrong. It felt stupid.

And for whatever fucking reason, leaving without Brienne felt like leaving another limb behind. But he had to, they both knew he had to, or they’d never leave at all. 

Walking out the front door, feeling the chill on his skin like ice, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and he forced himself to swallow. He forced himself to ignore all of it and believe everything was fine and that he’d be back in 24 hours. It was simple. 

Follow these men he didn’t know, these men he didn’t even fucking trust. God, she really was rubbing off on him. 

But it was a mission. He could do a mission. One goal, to be reached, then it was over. 

There were five of them, himself not included, bundled and armed and trekking across the frozen wasteland of a city that used to be, a world that used to be. They must have brought them to the center of town, to Harrenhall, when they first bound and gagged and knocked them out. Broken buildings towered around him like crooked teeth in a dead man’s mouth. Fog clung to the air, swept between streets like smoke, thick and cool in the air. 

This was what the apocalypse looked like. Mist and shadows and buildings tumbling down to rubble. Quiet and desolation and emptiness.

What humanity had built, was broken at his feet.

He felt for the gun at his left, the small revolver they had allowed him to carry. He didn’t feel any safer. Not with the fact that he still couldn’t fucking shoot with his useless left hand. 

He wished, for maybe the twelfth time since the door closed between them, Brienne was there to fill the space of his missing hand. Maybe to fill something else. Something he really didn’t fucking understand, and didn’t really want to. 

She was his friend now. He could admit that right? They’d saved each other and despite it all they trusted each other and part of him felt like maybe he needed her too. Maybe it wasn’t just part of some survival instinct. They had started as angry pieces of a different puzzles, pieces that didn’t fit and pieces that made different pictures.

But now…

Now it felt like she was the one piece missing from him. And he fucking hated it. 

So he pushed it away. And he ignored it.

He couldn’t focus on the things he needed to do, he couldn’t focus on this ‘mission’ of his, if his mind was jumping through hoops and drowning in thoughts of pale straw and pools of ice. He wouldn’t be distracted.

They fanned out amongst the wreckage. Silent men treading through a graveyard. 

He hadn’t been into a city, into any real form of civilization, since the outbreak. It was stupid, and it was reckless. Higher concentrations of people meant higher concentrations of the dead. 

Why risk it?

Now he looked around himself. This place that used to be alive, used to bustle with bodies and lights and sound. And now it was silent and it was cold and it was grey. He thought if this were a movie, an ominous soundtrack would be playing over their footsteps. It wasn’t a comforting thought.

There was not even the sound of hissing or foreign footsteps. There were no shadows in the corners. There was no one, but these strangers and himself. 

There should be dead bodies. There should be danger.

And there wasn’t.

But what did he know? He just got here, these men didn’t seem bothered. He was probably overreacting. Letting his anxiety get the better of him. 

Maybe this was normal. 

They walked several blocks without seeing a thing. They were a quiet parade, save for the few orders whispered to each other. 

“Mind the alleys.”

“Keep your eyes sharp.”

And he did. But he didn’t see a _fucking thing._

In a city of thousands of people, where were their dead bodies roaming now? Where had the dead gone?

They moved slowly, with caution and with purpose. Down several streets and around more corners. His heart beat just a little too quickly and his breath turned into its own ghost around his lips and really he was too fucking old too be this stressed.

He hoped at the end of this, there would at least be some kind of alcohol he could fucking drown in.

A stiff drink, and maybe a warm room, and relaxed laughter…

He shook his head. 

“Keep your hands ready, we’re approaching. Just around this corner,” the man in front said. Jaime didn’t even know his fucking name.

But sure enough, he turned the corner with the rest of them, and what he had expected to see for the last few hours greeted him head on. 

A hoard, small enough for the likes of six armed men, but a hoard nonetheless. Snapping and angry and dead as usual, standing in front of a dark supermarket. Bloodshot eyes, yellow as piss. Bloated purple flesh barely hanging from faces. Dirty hands, dirtier teeth. All hustled together, shifting and grasping and growling for just a taste. 

And then it all happened too fast. Like it always did. He’d heard war stories, hell, he had his own to tell, and it wasn’t a slow motion fight. It never was. It was flashes. It came and it went and his body moved and reacted before his minds could tell him what to do. That’s how it always was for him. 

It happened between one breath and the next, when you were surviving on an instinct too cold and too wild for bare skin. 

They pulled their guns, their weapons. He did too. 

He held the revolver in his weak fucking hand and he pointed it like the rest of them, aimed for the head as much as he could.

But the gun clicked and nothing happened. Then it clicked again. 

And it wasn’t that he was missing, he realized on his third attempt, it was that the gun was jammed. There was something wrong and the dead were desperate for a taste of his skin

And he had a gun that wouldn’t shoot. 

He didn’t have time to curse it, or question it. There were teeth on his heels and survival was the only thing on his mind so he dropped the gun and the next thing he knew they were inside, gasping and shouting and sweating despite the cold. 

Somehow, it all felt a little too easy. 

He pretended he was only paranoid.

He pushed it away and pulled his focus back. 

The shelves were barely stocked with anything, much less with any kind of pantry item that has even a slight chance of lasting. But they moved through the aisles anyway, scrawny men filling their packs and shuffling around like he wasn’t there except for the occasional side eye and weary glance.

Even though he was crucial. 

Supposedly.

The whole building smelled like iron and rust and dirt. Like blood under his fingernails and sweat on his skin. It smelled dead. But so did everything really. The world had died and spit the ending back in their faces and so why wouldn’t it smell just like that?

A few men filed to the back and he felt like maybe he should follow, but someone, the one with the shifty eyes and the dirty face, he told Jaime to wait out front. And the way he said it, like cement and salt, it made him stay. 

It felt like he could be a ghost or invisible and nothing would have changed. 

So he watched the door and he watched the men and he thought about everything that was happening.

And somehow that made him feel worse.

 

 

Brienne did not count the hours that passed in the palm of her hand.

She did not watch in silence as shadows reached and receded across the stale walls.

She did not feel anxiety bloom like a bloody rose against her breast the longer Jaime was gone.

She didn’t.

There wasn’t a point. It was a simple task, he’d said so himself. They would leave, get the supplies, come back and then they would be able to go. Even if everything went perfectly, he wouldn’t be back yet. 

She told herself that, over and over, trying to convince herself everything was fine.

Still, she worried. 

And as she worried she thought about why. 

She thought about the stranger that earned her trust and her friendship and how weird it felt that he was gone now, when she had spent so long wishing he would be. How she had craved his departure and how now… now it hurt.

It didn’t make sense, and it was also the only thing that did. 

So she breathed and the spaces between her ribs ached and she let them. 

One hour. Two.

In. Out. 

She would grow hungry. She would grow tired. She would let herself worry because at least it was something and at least it reminded her of who she was, where she was, what was missing. Her anxiety let her know she was still human and there was something after this. 

God, she hoped.

She didn’t even entertain the idea that was the last time she’d see him and this was the place she would die. 

But she couldn’t shake the dark whispers in her own head that something was wrong. Not just his absence, but something else. 

That this was all going wrong. 

 

 

_It was dark and he didn’t have a fucking clue where he was._

_He only knew he was surrounded by shadows and they all had cold fingers and he knew, somewhere in the boiling pit of his stomach, that this was wrong and he was lost._

_Everywhere he looked was black and blue and empty. Everytime he tried to yell or whisper or simply speak, those shadows swallowed the sound. This was nothing. He was drowning in nothing. Not floating. Not falling. Not even existing._

_Just nothing._

_Until there was a shape. Until he turned and there were faces. Ones he didn’t recognize, ones he thought he might have, at some point. Pale faces like ghosts. Like flashlights being held under chins telling spooky stories. Like danger._

_Whispers and faces that came and went and all he could do was stand and try to catch something._

_He thought there was Cersei, somewhere to his left, haloed in gold and laughing. It sounded like bells._

_Maybe that was Tyrion, like a knife made of silk, chuckling like the bubble of wine._

_Laughter and whispers and his fingers were cold. It smelled like blood. Blood and old death long passed._

_He closed his eyes and he covered his ears and if he could have yelled he would have. If he could make his bones stop rattling and his lungs stop shaking he would have, but he fucking couldn’t and so he admitted he was scared._

_He was helpless and he was scared and he wished he was a ball of stone and he would sink._

_But then he felt something touch him. Something warm wrapping around his own hands like fingers made of water, warmed by the sun. They pulled his hands away, so gently, and he opened his eyes and it was light and yellow and he saw the ocean._

_The ocean in her eyes._

_“Brienne?” his voice had sound now. Rasping and grating._

_“What are you doing, Jaime?” she sighed, light like air. Air he wanted to float on. And she smiled and her fingers brushed against his cheek like a falling feather and she stared at him and, fuck, he still didn’t know what was going on, but this time he couldn’t find a single second to care._

_“I-”_

_There were no words in his head and no air in his chest._

_She grinned with crooked teeth and lips that stretched across skin dappled by freckles and blonde hair that just barely fell across her eyes._

_She laughed and it didn’t sound like bells, or like bubbling wine, or like silk wrapped around his throat, it sounded like a stampede. It sounded like an avalanche and the rumbling growl of a bear. He felt it grow in his chest. He felt it grow wings._

_He wondered, absently and all at once, what a laugh like that tasted like._

_But then she wasn’t smiling and she looked confused._

_“What’s wrong, Jaime?” she whispered. She said his name like it was broken._

_He didn’t know. He didn’t know what was wrong, he didn’t fucking know what was happening, or where he was, or why she was there. He grasped for something, some sort of answer he could give her to wipe the worry from her brow, to make her smile again, but there was nothing._

_He felt drunk and his mind felt slow and not connected to his body._

_He blinked and then she was crying. Small tracks of salt straining her pale cheeks. He wanted to wipe them away. Drag his finger over her skin and collect them in his palm._

_Her lips parted and trembled and the pink draining from them like watercolors dripping from her skin. Why was she crying? He didn’t want her to cry._

_She shook her head, blinking and sad. Her mouth turning blue as her eyes and her skin turning white and she kept crying._

_“Jaime?”_

Don’t cry. Please, don’t fucking cry. 

_It felt like something was being ripped from him as she stepped back and he couldn’t move towards her. He couldn’t do anything._

_Then, the blood bubbled from her lips, so dark and thick it could be wine, or it could be something worse. It spilled over her chin like a waterfall and he’d never felt so helpless._

_“Brienne!” It burns his throat to say it._

_She looked at him with those huge, wet eyes. Like she was begging him, like she needed him and he wasn’t doing anything. He couldn’t do anything. No matter how he tried to move she never got closer. And he wasn’t warm anymore and it was getting darker._

_She was the light and it was burning out and all he could do was panic._

_She stumbled and when she looked down he followed her eyes to the whole in her chest, to the red stain spreading over her torso and claiming her body and when she fell he couldn’t follow._

 

 

He woke up gasping and with sweat clinging to his trembling hands.

It took him several minutes to remember where he was, to look around himself and collect the shaking pieces of his mind and tell himself to calm down.

A nightmare. Only a nightmare.

She wasn’t dead at his side, there was no blood and there was no terror.

Only a nightmare.

It felt like more. It felt like something so much worse and he immediately wanted to turn around and go back for Brienne. He wanted to see her. He wanted to make sure she was okay and this shitty fucking supermarket detour was the last place he wanted to be.

When his breathing returned to normal after an embarrassingly long couple of minutes he realized he was alone. 

He had fallen asleep against the wall next to the door, and the other men were shuffling around him no longer. It was still dark in the cloudy shadows of the early morning and as he got to his feet, he knew.

That this was all wrong. The ease with which they got there, the jammed gun, the empty aisles and the mysterious backroom and the dream. He heard the whispers from behind the broken cover of the door and saw the stream of light from beneath it and he felt the chill.

Just like before.

And he knew.

Before he even looked through the window, he could taste his heart in his throat. As he stepped lightly around and when he looked past the glass he wanted to throw up. 

They were back there, these men, these strange and dangerous men, and it wasn’t a back room, it wasn’t for storage. It was a meat locker. 

A full meat locker… 

And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a living animal.

The cold, the whispers, the smell of blood, the fear… it fit together in his mind and he fucking wished he had listened to Brienne. He wished he wasn’t there.

They stood around each other, around a single man, around a table, around the body.

The human body.

Limbs. Finger. Faces.

And he knew why he was there. He knew exactly why.

Why they wanted him, even weak, instead of Brienne, why the gun had jammed, why any of it was happening, it all jumped around in his head like angry fleas, his heart racing, bile in his mouth, choking him. 

Cannibals. 

They were fucking cannibals and they brought him there to kill him and cleave the flesh from his bones and swallow it down like pork. 

And Brienne was alone. With even more of them than he was. Trapped inside their walls and their hallways like a cage.

_Brienne._

_Choking on blood, her blue lips trembling._

His fear turned into anger turned into rage like a fire growing in his ribcage and singing his bones. 

The shadow fell over his shoulder a second before he turned.

 

 

Brienne’s anxiety did not fade with the day. If anything it got worse. It got stronger and thicker in the air until it filled her nose and her lungs. 

Because it felt so wrong and it felt like there was a clock in the back of her head counting down to something terrible and she could not figure out what. All she knew was this place was bad and with Jaime gone, it felt worse. 

The walls of her stained white room got smaller and smaller around her and the pinch between her shoulder blades got tighter and there was an incredible scream building in her throat.

And she couldn’t take it.

She had planned on staying in the room until he came back, like they had said, but it was too much and she felt too trapped and the next thing she knew she had decided to leave.

The mess hall was quiet, quieter than the last time she had been there, and she pulled her sweater tighter around her arms, like it was armor made of iron instead of soft wool.

There were only three men in there with her. Three men too many and they all grinned at her like hungry animals with mouths full of sharp teeth and claws instead of fingers and she had to force herself not to shudder. 

One was the one who had grabbed her, meaty hands, dirty face. The tattoo of an angry bear clawing through the skin of her forearm. Black and white and made of ink ready to swallow her up. 

The other two were smaller. A wiry red haired man with tiny eyes, and jittery even as he stood still, but his face, his tiny smirk, it made her skin crawl. And, she noticed, the tongueless man from her room. 

She hated it. She hated all of it, them, the walls, the food, the floor beneath her feet. 

She told herself Jaime should be back soon, any hour. He’d come through the doors alive and they would leave.

No matter how many times she repeated the idea, not a part of her believed it. 

Brick walls on brick walls filled with eyes that were stripping her to her bare bones. 

It felt like a death sentence. That’s the only thing she could think. Paranoia and anxiety and all the mistrust Jaime had leant her when he left. 

It felt like the end.

She chewed on a piece of jerky that was too salty and too stringy and she looked at the cold pile of mush in front of her, at the fork next to it. At the butter knife. Dull and smooth. 

She put it up her sleeve when she was sure no one was looking.

It was cool against her wrist. 

She heard them snicker and move around her, even from across the hall. Hyenas and wolves and bears. They whispered in the corner and she could feel the way they looked at her. Like their eyes were hands and they traveled up and down her body.

She focused on her plate. She focused on her hands, her fingers.

Then, the door shut. 

The man with no tongue was gone, the door was closed, and the two men left were looking at her. 

And they looked hungry.

 

 

There was blood between his fingers and in his hair and dripping from his nose. 

No matter how much he wiped away, there was blood and it stained him red and black and brown and he didn’t fucking care.

He ignored it and he just kept breathing. He made himself breathe and he made his muscles fucking move and he didn’t think of anything else. 

Just the one thought, repeated over and over like a broken tape. Just her name.

_Brienne._

_Brienne._

_Brienne._

 

 

The big one, with the bear on his arm, stepped towards her, and he smiled with missing teeth and she felt like she was already dead. Like he was looking at a carcass made of bones.

Except she wasn’t. Not yet. 

People had underestimated her and her strength and all the fight she had inside her, for her entire life. And every time they did, she proved them wrong.

She was tired and she was weak and she was trapped, but fuck it if she wasn’t also Brienne. Also a fighter, also a _warrior._ And right then, that’s what she was going to be. 

Not scared. Not a damsel. 

A knight.

He came up to her on the other side of the table, and she let the fear show. She let him think he had won as he leaned towards her, massive hands on the tabletop too close to her skin, breath smelling dead and rotten. 

She waited and he leered and then she moved.

She flipped her plate into his face, and slammed the table against his stomach. Heard the whoosh of air leaving him as he stumbled.

She ran for the door.

The smaller one beat her there, slamming into her middle with as much strength as his thin shoulders could manage. 

He wrestled her to the ground, cold stone grinding into her back.

The knife slid from her sleeve into her hand, smooth and dull, but it went into his neck just the same. The blood poured out, and it clung to her fingers and coated her arm like warm syrup running across her skin. Sticky and thick. 

It smelled like rust. 

She had only just pushed free, scrambling to run, and then the hand was in her hair jerking her entire body backwards by the roots. And her head slammed into the wall.

Blood trickled down her temple. This time it was hers. 

She couldn’t see.

Fuck, she couldn’t even think.

Her brain felt like sludge and everything around her was blurry and soft and she wanted to throw up around the feeling of hammers through her skull. 

Blood and pain and confusion were all she knew.

Maybe that’s all there was.

He pulled her head back and his breath was too hot on her neck. “Oh,” he chuckled, “so you want to make this a show?”

He dropped her, body hitting the ground like a weak bag filled with stone. She tried to breathe and she tried to focus and all he did was laugh. 

His boot hit her in the stomach, not as hard as he could, she knew that. But hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to roll her body sideways with the force of it.

It made her angry.

But as she tumbled over, gripping her middle and gritting her teeth, she got closer to the first body that fell. The one still choking on his own blood around the knife lodged in his throat.

She lunged.

It slid from his skin like butter and met the Bear’s calf just as easily, only pulling back when it met bone.

His knee connected with her chin. 

Her neck snapped around and her body fell backwards once again. 

She tasted blood. Pennies on her tongue, sliding down her throat. She spit it to the ground with strings of red trailing from her lips like threads cut from cloth. 

All he did was laugh. 

Like she was his toy. Like they were playing the most dangerous game and like he fucking enjoyed it. He enjoyed every second of it, every grunt, every drop of blood, every bead of fucking sweat. Every step he took he grinned.

There wasn’t a part of her that did not hurt, that did not bleed or weep or ache. 

Still, she held the small blade between her slick fingers like it was her own life. It felt like it was. 

She stood. 

He came closer and she swung wildly, through the haze in her head. She lashed out like a madwoman, like she was crazed and bloodthirsty and as savage as he was. Dull metal met flesh. His arm bled, but not enough. None of it was _enough._

She kicked him in the chest, the heel of her foot hitting his sternum, but he was too solid and she was too disoriented and it did nothing. 

“You like to play don’t you?” he chuckled. It sounded the way vomit tasted. “Don’t worry. We’ll play a long time.”

There were worms on her skin and ants in her hair and every part of her recoiled at the thought and at the sound of his voice. 

The next time she lunged her grabbed her, one hand on her wrist the other yanking her face close too his. So close she could see the sweat on his temples, the mania in his eyes.

He licked the blood from her face. Like an animal. Sloppy, wet, delighted.

She could be an animal too.

She had a beast in her own chest desperate for blood and it roared, ripping through her chest and out her lips, primal and raw. She sent her knee up, between his legs, as hard as she fucking could. He shook with it. Shook and howled, his hands dropping from her body as he stumbled away. 

Not before his knuckles snapped against the side of her face and sent her to the ground. Knife skittering from her fingers, too far away to reach. 

She couldn’t breathe.

She couldn’t think.

There was only pain and there was only rage, but none of it felt like enough.

He recovered before her, and this time it wasn’t a game. This time, he thirsted for her. It dripped between his teeth and when his thick fingers grabbed her throat like a noose, she almost expected him to snap her neck and end it there.

He didn’t.

He slammed her against the wall and his fingers tightened. 

“This is going to hurt. A lot.” 

He had his own knife, pulled from his side where she hadn’t noticed it before, sharpened and glittering in his hand. He smiled as it sliced into her skin in a deep, even line, starting at the soft expanse of her neck and ending at her collar bone. The metal was cold, but her blood was warm.

She didn’t scream.

She wanted to. God, she wanted to, but she swallowed it down, forced it into her stomach and didn’t make a noise. His laughter never stopped, it never quieted. The more blood he spilled, the louder it got. 

He cut her again, deeper, till she felt the tip of it drag against her bone. 

His face was getting muddled. Like a reflection in a pool someone had thrown a rock into. Rippling and fading. The focus went in and out and her chest burned. 

The grip on her neck only tightened. 

She tried. She really tried, to kick and claw at his arms. She scratched until she felt skin and blood under her nails and still he didn’t move. She was strong, but he was stronger. 

She was going to die. 

He was going to grasp her neck and tear into her skin and laugh at the blood on his hands until there was nothing left. And then he would play with the lifeless shell of her like she was a toy. A rag doll instead of a person and she was going to die. 

She hoped Jaime was away. Far away. She hoped they didn’t get him too. 

It was odd, that her mind should go there, to him, as she died. Very odd indeed.

The Bear sneered and everything got fuzzier. It got dark around the edges. This was the end, her life was over and the picture was fading and it was the end. 

“Are you going to cry for me? I love it when they cry.”

Pain.

No air.

Her eyes squeezed shut. 

She didn’t want his haggard mocking face to be the last thing she saw, she didn’t want that to be her final memory. Dark eyes and manic grin and the thirst for her blood and her death smiling back at her. No.

That wasn’t the last face she wanted to see. 

She saw Jaime’s face instead. His stupid grin. Stupid sparkling eyes. She pictured it. That was a nice thing to see. 

Before she died.

_Oh, Jaime…_

“No,” the beast growled. “Look at me! I want you to-”

He didn’t finish.

There was something, a far away sound that didn’t really fit in her ears, like a crack. It cut his words out of the air. 

And something wet sprayed her face. Something hot and sticky, spraying across her skin like water. 

That was not what it was. 

The hand dropped away and air filled her lungs so quickly it hurt. 

But what didn’t hurt by then?

She gasped. She gasped and binked and she sagged against the wall, the brick barely keeping her from falling. It felt slick too.

There was a body at her feet. A still body, surrounded by red silk, staring at the ceiling like it was a chapel. He didn’t move. 

Neither did she. 

He stared somewhere far away and she stared at him and she tried to breathe. 

Dead.

He was dead and she wasn’t and her body shook. 

She was in shock. She couldn’t feel a thing apart from the pain and she couldn’t move even though she wanted to. All she could do was look at the pooling blood and breathe through the fire in her lungs. 

Look and breathe.

Nothing else.

“Brienne?”

Her name. Someone, somewhere, was saying her name.

It called from her left, a soft voice, apprehensive, rough. It sounded like gravel and honey and the best part of a song. It didn’t sound real. Like maybe she was delirious or maybe she really was dead and it wasn’t really there.

But then she looked.

And it was. 

“Jaime?”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trucking along y'all, trucking along...

He took out the two men at the entrance and another one just inside the door. Three faces, five shots. From a gun taken off a different body. There were days where it would have taken less, not too long ago. Now he might have been a bad shot, but it was a good thing they were worse.

It was quiet inside. Quiet and cold and he could still feel the fucking anxiety tainting every breath he took. Every step was towards Brienne and every step scared him more. It made him feel sick, like he was right on the edge of throwing up something that would be cold and thick.

The faint flickering light at one end of the hall made his heart tick. This place was dead, but she couldn’t be.

He didn’t have a layout of the place. Fuck if he wished he had payed more attention. Wished he had mapped it out in his mind. Wished he had listened to Brienne and realized earlier this was a slaughterhouse and a prison and not some place safe.

But he hadn’t, so he passed each hall with eyes sharp and muscles tense. Stolen gun in his hand, stolen pack over his shoulders.

His feet were silent on the dirty floor and his steps were slow despite every single fucking part of him telling him to hurry, urging him forward. 

He shot another man.

One bullet to the shoulder then another to the forehead, until blood spilled like wine around his feet and he stepped around the body. 

He didn’t think about how it felt. He didn’t playback any of the memories, dark red and black, of war and death and just a single goal to achieve. But his body knew it. His body remembered it and he was a shadow moving through halls and he was death.

To get to her he would be fucking death and destruction and rage.

He didn’t have any idea why or what it meant, he didn’t care. It was only her name and her face and the drive that she was not dying today. Maybe he didn’t want to be alone, maybe the idea of her being gone, and leaving him by himself again was a nightmare. 

She was all he fucking had left. The only thing. 

He didn’t know what he’d do by himself anymore. 

His heart tasted like charcoal and rust where it beat in his mouth.

He finally recognized a hall, a door, and a wall. The place where her room was. More a cell than a room. His feet carried him to it, quick as they could.

The door was open.

The door was open and when he stood in the doorway she wasn’t there. And he panicked. He fucking panicked and he really thought for a second that his heart might have actually stopped before it dropped to the floor. It made his hand shake and his head hurt. 

She wasn’t where she was supposed to be, where he left her, in this madhouse full of fucking predators.

The only thing that calmed him, the only thing that kept him from losing everything and tearing it all apart, was how it looked the same. 

No sign of a struggle. 

No drops of blood. Nothing broken.

She would have torn it open. She would have left a wreck if they had taken her. She was Brienne and she was a storm and if they pulled her through that door she would have taken it off its hinges. 

So he took a breath. And then another one. And he reminded himself to keep his head on his shoulders where it was supposed to be because that was not the moment. Not for this.

He could freak out later.

There was a noise outside, in the hall. The sound of feet not as quiet as they thought they were. He waited, coiled spring, until he saw the shadow, the quivering shape of man, and he moved. Slamming his body into another, into the wall. Pinning him there with muscle and force. Iron.

He wanted it to hurt.

“Where is she?” he asked, he demanded. With his gun pressed dangerously to the soft skin under his chin and his face nose to nose.

The man giggled madly, crazed. Showing broken yellow teeth and only looking at him with half-lidded, bloodshot eyes. Strings of saliva between his lips.

Jaime let him go enough to knock body back even harder against the bricks, skull snapping hard. 

“Where. The. Fuck. Is. She?” He growled and spit and bared his teeth. He became the deranged lion desperate and dangerous, and it bled from his eyes. It dripped from his mouth.

“She’s in the mess hall,” he said with a dirty grin. “She’s playing with a bear.”

Jaime shot him anyway. 

And his feet carried him away. 

He wasn’t quiet anymore, and he wasn’t careful. He ran and he would shoot down any fucking person that got in his way. He would tear them in half.

The door was shut and, god, he saw blood. A pool of blood seeping and spreading from under the entrance. The only thing he could see, the only image that kept flashing through his head was her body. Her cold dead body, bleeding out on the other side of that wood.

It scared him. It scared the fucking shit out of him.

_No._

It was all he thought.

_No. No, no, no, nonononono-_

His fear wanted to drown him and part of him wanted to let it. But he didn’t. He gripped his gun and pushed the door and even when he felt it drag, felt it push against what had to be a body, he didn’t stop and he didn’t break. 

And it wasn’t hers.

It wasn’t her pale blue eyes he saw. They were brown and cold. It was only another dead man, with blood pouring from his mouth and a hole in his throat. 

She was there though. 

Another look, a glance to his side, and he saw her. He saw her bloodied body pressed to the wall and the hand around her throat. He saw the knife held to her chest, pushing down through her skin. Her eyes closing.

He didn’t even think. 

He didn’t remember he couldn’t shoot with his left hand. He didn’t calculate the distance there was between him and her death. He didn’t even know if he aimed at all. He was on autopilot and his brain, and his body, did it for him. He just knew his hand lifted in front of him and then there was a shot.

Blood sprayed from each side of his head, painting the walls and her face with red gore. The hand released her neck, and as it fell so did his body. He hit the floor with a wet thud like a pile of meat. 

And then no one moved. 

She stood frozen, gasping for air and he could see her tremble. He could see just the slightest shake in her fingertips and in her shoulders. She stared at the body and her chest heaved. 

She only watched him and she only tried to breathe.

Breathing. Alive.

She was alive.

“Brienne?” he said. He couldn’t help it. He felt like he was bleeding it, her name. Like it was pouring out of him.

_Alive._

She looked at him like she didn’t quite see him at first. Like maybe he was a ghost and she was looking through him and she didn’t understand it. She blinked, deep eyes and pale lashes fluttering until the picture cleared and she could see him.

“Jaime?” she choked. 

It was rough and he barely heard it. 

But that was all it took. A feather breaking everything around them. 

He went to her, hurriedly stepping around bodies, leaving bloody footprints behind him until he was in front of her. A hand on one shoulder, around his gun, and a wrist on the other. He held her here between his limbs and finally he could breath. 

Whatever fear was choking him, whatever he had been afraid of, it melted away looking at her. 

He moved his shortened wrist to wipe some of the dripping blood from her face with his sleeve. Sopping it up and smearing it from her skin. And he looked at the gashes across her chest, the flayed skin peeling back in jagged lines. He saw the smashed flesh at her temple. It hurt.

Then, he didn’t know what to say or what to do. He just wanted to look at her. And she just looked back. And they breathed and gasped and he thought they might have both been shaking.

God, he wouldn’t admit it, but it felt so fucking good. 

“You okay?” he asked. 

She swallowed and nodded, like she was still struggling to find her voice. 

It was another weight gone.

_Real. Alive. Okay._

His blood was made entirely of relief. Everything was soft with it. Like that room was a bubble and all he could focus on was her breathing because he had been so afraid.

There was a shout outside, past the door, halls away, and reality startled itself back in. Where they are.

Steel and armor slide over both of them in the snap of a finger and they go back to war.

He got in and he got her. Now they had to get out.

“We have to leave. Now. You good?”

“Yeah.” She wiped more blood from her face. She looked like war, and then she moved away from him, just a step, to pull the knife from the dead bear’s claws and grasp it in her own hand. Fingers flexed around the handle, and she looked up at him and nodded. He checked his clip and nodded in return.

_Go time._

He saw the calm spread over her. Determined and hard and, god, fucking strong as hell.

His Brienne, the one he knew, ready to fight their way out blade and bullet. 

He nodded back and he didn’t think about when Brienne had become his Brienne.

His… 

He didn’t.

 

 

She slit a man’s throat and blood welled around her fingers.

He sent bullets flying into the chest of another.

Footsteps. Gunshots. Gurgling blood. 

Sweat. Screams.

They clawed their way out and they left nothing but bodies behind them. Locke stood at the entrance, the fool of a man, thinking he would stop them and they marched on. It was satisfying to see him stutter. The fucking bastard.

The stupid, sniveling piece of shit staring them down with a dagger at his side.

He looked like he was going to speak, like he had something to say he thought they should hear. His mouth opened and Jaime shot him in the stomach without blinking, without missing a step. The stomach so it wasn’t quick. So it lasted and he felt every fucking bit of it. 

And so he would come back. 

They walked over his body, twitching and grunting and cursing them, right out the door. 

Then, they ran. Through the streets and down alleyways and past wreckage, until eventually the buildings turned into trees and they found some tiny bit of safety. Concrete turned to gravel turned to dirt and cold wet earth. Running slowed to a jog until they had to stop and their burning lungs and aching muscles screamed. 

It was behind them now.

He put the gun in his belt and his hand ached at the release of so much tension. Then, he found a moment to look at her wearily. Covered in blood and grime from her face to her shoulders to her jeans. She was stained red. 

She looked at him and swallowed, swaying only a little on her feet. Pain and exhaustion grabbed for her through the adrenaline, he knew. They were grabbing for him too.

“You okay?” he asked again. 

She didn’t give him an answer, only wiped at her forehead and started to tip.

He stepped towards her, with caution.

“Brienne? Hey?” 

_Don’t fade on me now. Not now._

Her hands grabbed for him, clutching at his biceps as she kept herself upright and collected her mind. And her breath. He hated how those fingers felt thin and felt breakable.

She wasn’t fucking breakable.

He let her take what she needed. Time, air, quiet. He didn’t say anything.

Her head fell until her forehead just rested softly on the edge of his shoulder, just for one breath, for two. Some part of him desperately wanted to hold her. Something else he didn’t understand, couldn’t place. This urge to surround her and protect her even though he knew she didn’t fucking need it. 

He wanted to do it anyway. 

And as he ignored, the confusing why of it all, she pulled herself back up, back straight and face a mask of concealed struggle, but solid strength. He thought right then she could be someone from an epic, from a saga or a storybook.

“I’m good,” she nodded. He tried not to worry about the way her voice cracked. The strain in her throat caused by thick fingers.

“Don’t lie.”

“Jaime-” He didn’t let her finish.

“Come on. Sit down, we’ll clean you up.”

There wasn’t much in the pack he stole and, not for the first time, he wished he had taken a minute to actually think things through before he jumped into action. Grabbed something useful from the store instead of racing thought the doors and across the city back to her. 

Too late for that now. They could find something better later. They could worry about it later.

He wet a scrap of torn t-shirt and wiped it over her skin. Erasing the blood from her neck from her hands. He was surprised she let him. Sitting silently as the fabric pulled at her sore skin. 

He pressed it to her chest, along the three parallel slices in her skin. She didn’t even wince. 

As he took care of her - because truthfully that was what he was doing - he told her. The trap and the men and the death. 

“They were cannibals. Fucking cannibals, Brienne. I saw…” 

Her face went white as death.

And she emptied her stomach next to her feet. 

He rubbed her back as she wretched and heaved. His fingers brushed each section of her spine as soothingly as he could. He had thrown up too, afterwards, after he saw. He had thrown it all up too.

She swished her mouth with water and spit that out too, wiping dribble from her lips. 

“I… I ate some of it,” she told him, even though he had figured as much. He thought she might vomit again, but she only pressed a hand to her mouth and shook her head. “God, I ate some of it.”

It was so fucked up. Everything in the world was so god damn fucked up.

Even him.

(Not her though. Somehow not her.)

“How did you figure it out? I mean I know you saw it, but… How did you know something was wrong? What was the tip off?” she asked as he was trying to clean up her head wound as gently as he could, dabbing at the smashed and brutalized flesh.

He didn’t answer right away. He even thought about lying, making something up, some clue or slipped sentence. But he was tired and even if he wanted to his brain didn’t have the ability to cook anything else up.

He thought of the dream. The warm way she looked at him and then the cold way she had died. The lasting picture of her face.

“I had a dream about you,” he whispered. It felt like it might be breakable or like it should have stayed a secret. It felt like something changing.

She looked stunned, with her lips parted and her eyes wide. 

(He kinda liked it. And he kinda wanted to take it all back too.)

“Oh,” was all her voice said. 

Just oh. Just a word and all the fucking air is sucked out of the space around them.

He realized his hand wasn’t worrying about the mess of her anymore. His fingers had slipped and his thumb stroked her cheek, so lightly, barely brushing across the skin. Skin so warm and so soft for someone that didn’t project either of those things. They froze, his hand and her breathing, and they looked at each other in a way that feels different, but familiar. 

_Her eyes, fuck, her eyes could be the ocean..._

And suddenly he felt like it was too much and he was too open and too bare. His cover, his wall, was gone and it was too much emotion and he needed to break it. 

“It was quite nasty actually. You finally had that skimpy little nurse outfit on,” he smirked. 

“You’re insufferable,” she huffed, but he saw the way the corner of her mouth lifted too. So it felt like a win anyway. 

“You were quite fetching, said some things to me.”

Even the tiniest smirk, the smallest twitch of her lips. 

It was something, maybe he would admit to himself, he liked to see. Something special. 

It was gone too soon. Those too full lips fell and her eyes stopped looking at him and shifted to her lap and to something a little farther away. 

When did he become someone who cared, specifically cared about her, this much? 

“I thought that was it,” she whispered. 

“What?”

“I thought that was the end. It was over. He had his hand… I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t get away and I really thought I was dying. He was gonna kill me.”

It fucking hurt.

Hearing her admit that and hearing the vulnerability in her voice, it fucking hurt. 

“I was scared,” and her eyes were wet. 

“I was too,” he admitted.

_I was fucking terrified._

“But you’re not dead,” he said. “They are.”

_We made sure of it._

She nodded and when the first tear slipped free and ran down her face, he thought, well fuck it, and hugged her. His arms wound around her shoulders and he pulled her body against his chest, as tight as he could. His hand went to her hair, slick with sweat and stiff with blood, threading through it and pressing her face into his shoulder. 

She froze at first, caught off guard and awkward, but then her arms went around him too. And she held him back just as desperately. 

It was like the realization set in and they knew what they had just survived. The adrenaline was gone and all that was left was emotion. 

He kissed the side of her head before he could think better of it, just a soft brush of his lips, and then he pushed his whole face into that fair hair so everything he felt was her.

“We’re okay,” he told her. 

It wasn’t entirely the truly. 

It was far fucking from it actually. They were falling apart and the world was really trying it’s hardest to kill them and they were a fucking mess.

But they were alive and they were with each other. 

And he thought that, at least, was important.

 

 

_She couldn’t breathe._

_She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t move._

_She was made of ice._

_Cold sculpture of frozen water._

_She wanted to scream, but she could not. She couldn’t do anything, but be afraid. And she hated to be afraid._

_The bear had black eyes._

_Black eyes and brown fur and blood between its teeth._

_Teeth that were snapping and dripping an inch from her face._

_Afraid._

_Weak._

_Helpless._

_No._

_Paw pressed to her throat, claws in her skin._

_Sweat._

_No._

_No._

_The pressure lifted. A paw pulling back to strike._

_Air filled her lungs and she screamed._

 

 

She woke to darkness and the smell of salt. 

Salt of her own cold sweat and her own tears and it took her too long, too many agonizing seconds to catch her breath and remember where she was. 

It was the hand on her arm that pulled her back, that calmed her racing, terrified heart. A warm palm, calloused fingers running up and down her arm, from elbow to shoulder, in slow soothing lines. 

Jaime’s hand.

Jaime.

And she was Brienne. Alive. Amongst the trees. Where there was no bear and she was not dying. Not immediately anyway.

“It’s okay,” his voice called. It was rough, roused from his own sleep, but it was soft. 

She leaned into it. His voice and his touch and the comfort of it. They wouldn’t talk about it. The dark gave them secrets, it was a cover and when it faded so did this. 

But she was still afraid, and she was still human, and she couldn’t help it. She turned into him, curled her massive body back against his until his arm left hers and wound around her waist. Until they fit together and where he ended she began and she felt a little safer. 

She didn’t need it, the comfort or safety or him even, no she didn’t need it. But she wanted it. 

They wouldn’t talk about it.

She wouldn’t say it, not ever, not to him. 

Maybe she didn’t even know it yet.

But if she looked back, if she watched that moment again, she was probably already in love with him.


End file.
